New edge-centric features spotlighted in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ansible, OpenShift
Red Hat said it’s prioritizing the enterprise adoption of edge compute architectures with new cross-portfolio announcements. The company made a number of edge-related product announcements on Tuesday. They took against the backdrop of Red Hat Summit, a mostly virtual event with a physical counterpart in Boston, emphasizing scalability and manageability across hybrid cloud topologies and strong IT security.
Red Hat’s edge play consists of “a set of new cross-portfolio edge features and capabilities,” it said, with the goal of helping Red Hat customers adapt to edge computing. Red Hat wants to make it easer and faster to deploy edge solutions, and thinks it can help by improving edge security and app lifecycle management. The company is making foundational changes throughout its product like to support the Red Hat Edge initiative, it said.
Red Hat Edge comprises a broad set of technologies, according to the company. It starts with edge-centric changes to the company’s Enterprise Linux and OpenShift deployments as the foundation. Red Hat’s Ansible adds IT edge deployment automation, with Red Hat’s Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes providing cloud app orchestration and OpenShift Data Foundation edge storage.
Changes to Red Hat OpenShift 4.10 make zero-touch provisioning at scale possible and supports for factory workflows for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), said the company. That’s great for automated edge provisioning and should make it easier for users to detect errors in manufacturing facilities too. There’s an upside for telcos in this news, too:
“Customers can use this pre-configured Red Hat OpenShift to more quickly deliver radio access networks (RAN) for next-generation mobile networks,” said the company.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9, also announced today, incorporates edge management features to enable centralized control of edge deployments, and intelligent roll-back for Podman, Red Hat’s Kubernetes cluster and pod management tool.
Red Hat announced the general availability of Ansible Automation Platform on Microsoft Azure. Ansible is an IT automation tool for cloud provisioning and configuration management. Support for Azure includes integrated billing with Microsoft, said Red Hat. Red Hat partners including Kyndryl have validated content for the deployment.
Red Hat Cloud Services tackle hybrid cloud complexity
Red Hat emphasizes its Cloud Services portfolio as an important solution to help enterprise IT manage hybrid cloud deployments. Hybrid cloud introduces challenges and complexities that businesses trying to unshackle themselves from years of technical debt probably aren’t anxious to incur.
“Red Hat Cloud Services are designed to tackle the complexities of hybrid cloud. Organizations are facing challenges such as application sprawl and monolithic application support. To succeed, organizations need tools to modernize applications while reducing delivery times and operational overhead,” the company explained.
Red Hat Cloud Services’ new offerings include a service registry for OpenShift to help developers reuse Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and schema. The company also announced OpenShift Connectors, which provide third-party connectivity and “no-code integration” with OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka, the data pipeline management tool.
Red Hat’s OpenShift Database Access is a Database as a Service (DBaaS) to provision and manage access to third-party database service. Red Hat says it will simplify provisioning and cloud access for developers.
OpenShift Data Science is Red Hat’s managed cloud service for data scientists to train and test Machine Learning (ML) models. The company has added compliance improvements and made it available as an add-on for OpenShift Dedicated and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS customers.
