Red Hat pushes hybrid cloud to the edge

Red Hat has unveiled new edge capabilities for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The firm has also expanded the number of supported environments for Red Hat OpenShift, including leading public clouds and multiple datacenter architectures, like IBM Z and Power Systems.

At this year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Red Hat launched several edge-focused updates to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the rapid creation of operating system images for the edge through the Image Builder capability. 

The firm said this would enable IT organizations to create purpose-built images optimized for architectural challenges inherent to edge computing but customized for the needs of a given deployment.

Red Hat also unveiled remote device update mirroring to stage and apply updates at the next device reboot or power cycle, helping limit downtime and manual intervention from IT response teams.

The edge update sports over-the-air updates that transfer less data while still pushing necessary code. Red Hat aims this update at sites with limited or intermittent connectivity. 

Another feature announced is Intelligent rollback built on OSTree capabilities, enabling users to provide workload-specific health checks to detect conflicts or code issues. When it detects a problem, it automatically reverts the image to the last good update to prevent unnecessary downtime at the edge.

Red Hat also announced updates to Red Hat OpenShift 4.6 intended to help enterprises accelerate cloud-native application development. The latest update to OpenShift Serverless with Red Hat OpenShift Serverless 1.11 brings full support for Knative eventing, enabling containerized applications to consume only the resources they need at a given time, which prevents over- or under-consumption.

There is also a Red Hat build of Quarkus, a Kubernetes-native Java stack fully supported by Red Hat. With a single Red Hat OpenShift subscription, customers now have full access to Quarkus, enabling developers to repurpose mission-critical Java applications on Kubernetes, backed by Red Hat’s enterprise support.

Red Hat OpenShift 4.6 now includes new edge computing features with remote worker nodes, extending processing power to space-constrained environments. This enables IT organizations to scale remotely while maintaining centralized operations and management.

OpenShift 4.6 will also extend capabilities for public-sector Kubernetes deployments, including availability on AWS GovCloud and Azure Government Cloud, extended OpenSCAP support and more. 

Further extending OpenShift’s reach into the public cloud domain is Azure Red Hat OpenShift, a jointly-managed, engineered and supported offering on Microsoft Azure backed by Microsoft and Red Hat’s expertise. A similar service is expected to launch on AWS with joint management and support from Red Hat and Amazon.