Red Hat Openshift: Develop. Deploy. Manage.

James Whitehurst, President and CEO

Demands for faster production times, higher quality, and more predictable cost management have become central to any application development strategy. Every organization covets well-designed applications, the ability to deploy to cloud and on-premise environments, independently update services and deploy fixes and new features in hours or days, not months. The focus is not just successfully releasing new applications, but also updating those applications frequently to respond to constantly evolving markets. To help businesses develop a well-planned agile approach: continuous integration and development (CI/CD) and containers have emerged as proven methodology. The open source mastermind, Red Hat [NYSE:RHT], having worked with open source communities for over two decades, seizes this opportunity to lead the path for containerized infrastructures and development ecosystems, solving enterprises’ app development and delivery challenges.

James Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, says, “Containers combine the potential for rapid delivery with the flexibility to define the details of the underlying platform, from the development language to the operating system. We look at containers as a huge opportunity for us because it allows us to expose and offer even more value than the standard operating system.” Built on Red Hat’s proven open source technologies, its OpenShift Container Platform helps application development and IT operations teams modernize applications, deliver new services, and accelerate development processes. Providing a secure enterprise-grade environment with policy-based control and automation, the environment gives developers an optimal platform for building and deploying applications along with their components in a self-service fashion.

Propelling Container Technology

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform also integrates with OpenStack to build a DevOps Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). “OpenShift is basically Red Hat Linux, Docker containers, Kubernetes, and Ansible—which we think are the leading projects for their components—all brought together in a consumable container runtime,” says Whitehurst.

Containers combine the potential for rapid delivery with the flexibility to define the details of the underlying platform, from the development language to the operating system

Regardless of an application’s architecture, OpenShift enables clients to easily and quickly build, develop, and deploy containers in nearly any infrastructure, public or private. Whether it’s on-premise, in a public cloud, or hosted, clients have an award-winning platform to get their next big idea to market ahead of their competition. A Kubernetes-native container application platform backed by open Linux container standards, Red Hat OpenShift helps enterprises embrace cloud-native innovation while retaining existing IT investments through a single, scalable, and flexible solution.

"If you have four million microservices talking to and updating each other on a rapid-fire basis, how do you monitor those interactions and perform application performance management?"

Whitehurst believes that going from monolithic applications to microservices running in containers requires a whole new application platform and management paradigm to run; OpenShift is a core platform that allows containers to run at scale. With multiple deployment models, OpenShift meets the needs of various clients ranging from on-demand access (OpenShift Online) to enterprise public cloud (OpenShift Dedicated) to data center (OpenShift Container Platform). The Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, as well as the online hosted service, is built on open source platforms. Launched at the Red Hat Summit 2017, the next-generation of OpenShift Online helps developers focus on building applications instead of assembling and managing container files.

In an instance, Barclays, a global financial services provider, required to deliver products to market quicker and be more responsive to market trends. Barclays was looking to boost innovation and productivity by building an Application Platform-as-a- Service (aPaaS) as part of its cloud program. The financial services company used Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and other Red Hat solutions to update its IT infrastructure and adopt an agile, DevOps approach to application development, giving its developers on-demand, self-service capabilities.

As a result, the bank improved its efficiency and agility to innovate faster and stay competitive. “Now, with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, we’re more agile; we can think of an idea, try it, fail, learn, and make adjustments. Culturally, that’s a big change,” says Simon Cashmore, head of Platform-as-a- Service (PaaS) middleware engineering at Barclays.

Multiple Deployment Models

Red Hat’s thirst to bring continuous innovation is evident from its series of new launches to meet the critical IT needs like greater application security, compliance, and service consistency. Recently, the open source giant released a new online service—Red Hat OpenShift.io, an end-to-end open source development environment for planning, creating, and deploying hybrid cloud services in less time, with better results. OpenShift.io extends the already powerful developer features of Red Hat OpenShift Online. With the addition of Red Hat OpenShift.io, the company delivers the most robust, open, integrated, and supported cloud-native application development environment for production workloads.

Alongside, Red Hat realizes that as with any large implementation or deployment, the first few steps are often the most daunting. To help with the initial stages of a containerization project, Red Hat founded the Open Innovation Lab. Using the Lab, agencies can field containerization pilot programs where internal IT staff members are paired with Red Hat developers under a scope of pre-defined work. The Red Hat teams provide instruction, advice, and training that agency developers can take back to their organizations.

As containers open up limitless opportunities for applications inside an organization to interact with each other, it also presses the issue of: How will organizations be able to maintain and support such a dynamic environment? “If you have four million microservices talking to and updating each other on a rapid-fire basis, how do you monitor those interactions and perform application performance management? How do you diagnose issues when something goes wrong?” questions Whitehurst. Organizations simply can’t rely on a proprietary piece of source code to manage their multitude of application micro-services that are powering their critical business transactions. Owing to this, Red Hat’s future plans lie in making greater investments in the infrastructure to build a future-ready data and application control center. “Our aim is to remain as a catalyst of modern application development technology in this fast-paced, connected era,” concludes Whitehurst.