OpenEBS Certified With Red Hat OpenShift, StackPointCloud, and IBM Cloud

In the twelve months since open sourcing, @OpenEBS has become the most liked project of its type on @GitHub with a substantial contributor and user community. Users are now talking at meet-ups around the world about how they use OpenEBS to simplify and improve the storage of important data created by #microservices, whether running in enterprise #datacenters or on the #cloud.   This success has not gone unnoticed by partners that use @Kubernetes in their solutions.   Today @MayaData, the company behind @OpenEBS, has announced partnerships with @RedHat @OpenShift and @StackPointCloud, two of the leading Kubernetes based management platforms now available. OpenEBS was certified by both partners and now is an available default option for storage for the leading orchestration solution Kubernetes; OpenEBS runs on Kubernetes to provide storage to Kubernetes. Importantly, OpenEBS can run in conjunction with underlying shared storage to provide better control and performance while extending the life of existing shared storage systems. Technical leads from StackPointCloud and the OpenEBS community are doing two online Hangout / AMA sessions to demonstrate OpenEBS on StackPointCloud serving Jenkins and other workloads on Friday Feb 16, 2018.  

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/openebs-certified-with-red-hat-openshift-stackpointcloud-and-ibm-cloud-672729373.html

Latest Version of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Joins Infrastructure and Services Across Hybrid Cloud Environments

RALEIGH, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- #RedHat, Inc. (NYSE: #RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today launched @RedHat #OpenShift #Container Platform 3.7, the latest version of Red Hat’s enterprise-grade #Kubernetes container application platform. As application complexity and cloud incompatibility loom, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 helps IT organizations to build and manage applications that use services from the datacenter to the public cloud. The newest iteration of the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform includes native integrations with @Amazon Web Services ( #AWS ) Service Brokers that enable developers to bind services across AWS and on-premise resources to create modern applications while providing a consistent, open standards-based foundation to drive business evolution. #RedHat @OpenShift #Container Platform 3.7 joins #infrastructure & services across #hybridcloud environments Tweet this Cloud-native enterprise applications can consume services from multiple locations, including from the data center and multiple public clouds. Also, according to 451 Research, more than 60 percent of enterprises implementing cloud strategies are using two (or more) different cloud environments -- on-premises private clouds, hosted private cloud, and multiple public clouds. Increasingly, modern applications built for digital transformation rely on a mesh of loosely-coupled component and microservices, making consistency across cloud providers a significant challenge, but one that Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 helps to address. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform unites developers and IT operations on a single platform to build, deploy, and manage applications consistently across hybrid cloud infrastructures. This helps businesses achieve greater value by delivering modern and traditional applications with shorter development cycles and increased efficiencies. The platform is built on open source innovation and industry standards, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Kubernetes, and is trusted by many companies around the world. Bringing hybrid cloud applications to life With modern applications reliant upon disparate services and components from on-premise and cloud-based resources, being able to effectively stitch these pieces together in a consistent manner can be critical to delivering business innovation. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 helps to answer this need with the OpenShift Service Catalog, a fully-supported feature that enables IT organizations to connect any application running on the OpenShift platform to a wide variety of services, regardless of where that service runs. The OpenShift Service Catalog helps users search for, provision, and bind application services to OpenShift applications while providing a more secure and consistent way for administrators to provide new services to end users. This helps to free development teams from having to deeply understand service creation or consumption, and places more emphasis on building applications to deliver business value rather than sourcing services. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 will ship with OpenShift Template Broker, which turns any OpenShift Template into a discoverable service for application developers using OpenShift. OpenShift Templates are lists of OpenShift objects that can be implemented within specific parameters, making it easier for IT organizations to deploy reusable, composite applications comprised of microservices. Also included with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 is OpenShift Ansible Broker for provisioning and managing services through the OpenShift Service Catalog by using Ansible to define OpenShift Services. OpenShift Ansible Broker enables users to provision services both on and off the OpenShift platform, helping to simplify and automate complex workflows involving varied services and applications across on-premise and cloud-based resources. Production support for Service Catalog in OpenShift Container Platform builds upon Red Hat’s strong hybrid cloud technology portfolio, which includes: Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes, a collection of supported runtimes to lower the entry barrier for building and deploying cloud-native applications (now in beta). Red Hat Container-Native Storage 3.6, an enterprise-grade software-defined storage solution built from Red Hat Gluster Storage that serves storage out of containers, both on-premises and in the cloud. AWS Service integration First announced at Red Hat Summit 2017, Red Hat now makes popular AWS services accessible directly from Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. This integration enables AWS users to configure and deploy these services from OpenShift, and provides a single path of enterprise-grade support for customer needs. At launch, accessible AWS services through Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 include: Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS) Amazon Route 53 Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3) Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) Amazon ElastiCache Amazon Redshift Amazon DynamoDB Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) Additional features Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 also adds additional features and capabilities to help improve user experience and enhance platform security. These features include: Network Policy is now out of Technology Preview and generally supported, enabling project administrators to apply network rules and policies to inbound traffic for specific OpenShift pods. Prometheus (Tech Preview) is being introduced for monitoring and alerting in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7, building the popular monitoring solution (and CNCF project) directly into the OpenShift platform. Supporting Quotes Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager, OpenShift, Red Hat “Modern, cloud-native applications are not monolithic stacks with clear-cut needs and resources; to more effectively embrace modern applications, IT organizations need to re-imagine how their developers find, provision and consume critical services and resources across a hybrid architecture. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 addresses these needs head-on by providing hybrid access to services through its service catalog, enabling developers to more easily find and bind necessary services to their business-critical applications--no matter where these services exist--and adding close integration with AWS to further streamline cloud-native development and deployment.” Matt Yanchyshyn, director, Partner Solution Architecture, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “We are excited about our collaboration with Red Hat and the general availability of the first AWS Service Brokers in Red Hat OpenShift. The ability to seamlessly configure and deploy a range of AWS services from within OpenShift will allow our customers to benefit from AWS’s rapid pace of innovation, both on-premises and in the cloud.”
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171116005274/en/Latest-Version-Red-Hat-OpenShift-Container-Platform

Containers will oust VMs and storage arrays, says Red Hat

@RedHat launches storage delivered via #containers and predicts a future in which costly and inflexible #storagehardware and pricey #hypervisors will be a thing of the past The #traditionalstorage array will become a thing of the past – and so will the virtual machine and hypervisor. Costly and cumbersome and lacking the flexibility to support the unpredictable and “bursty” requirement of applications in the cloud era, they will be replaced by containers.

That is the view of Red Hat, which earlier this month launched Container-Native Storage 3.6 for Red Hat #OpenShift Container Platform 3.6, its distribution of the @Kubernetes container #orchestration software.

In Openshift Container Platform, customers can deploy applications via container, rapidly scaling instances according to workload requirements.

Container-Native Storage allows storage for container-based apps to be spun up, run and be decommissioned as required to support those applications and can run on-premise or in the cloud and with service levels set by policy.

New features in Container-Native Storage include the addition of support for block (via iSCSI) and object storage.

Containers – such as Docker – are emerging as an alternative to server virtualisation. They are effectively a form of software-defined server/storage and offer a form of virtualisation, but more lightweight, that runs directly on the operating system.

Containers lack the hypervisor layer, and also the often-duplicated data in virtual machine images.

Containers excel where the rapid scaling of web serving requests is met by the creation, use and dying out of many containers managed by an automated orchestration platform.

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/450428848/Containers-will-oust-VMs-and-storage-arrays-says-Red-Hat

Red Hat Debuts Versatile Software-Defined Storage for Cloud-Native Applications in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

RALEIGH, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- @RedHat, Inc. (NYSE: #RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced #RedHat Container-Native Storage 3.6, with support for containerized applications and infrastructure in Red Hat #OpenShift Container Platform clusters. Red Hat Container-Native Storage 3.6 comes on the heels of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.6, the latest version of Red Hat’s enterprise-grade Kubernetes container application platform, announced in August. #RedHat Container-Native #Storage 3.6 adds support for containerized apps & infra in @OpenShift. #containers Tweet this Red Hat Container-Native Storage, built upon Red Hat Gluster Storage, is integrated with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and uniquely serves storage out of containers. Red Hat Gluster Storage is enterprise-grade, durable, more secure and well-suited for the hybrid cloud as it supports both on-premise or public cloud deployments. These attributes make it ideally suited to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform deployments. Red Hat Container-Native Storage can eliminate the need to have an independent storage platform, enabling customers to achieve one integrated container platform that can span the hybrid cloud with greater efficiency and cost savings, a streamlined user experience, single control plane and a single point of support. Red Hat Container-Native Storage 3.6 The move to container-based applications can bring challenges to existing traditional storage architectures, holding back the drive for innovation and progress. Software-defined container-native storage addresses the challenges with the ability to merge the storage services with the container platform like any other container service and runs on physical, virtual, public cloud and even on top of traditional storage appliances. Existing traditional storage architectures do not always offer this level of inherent scale and flexibility and, as a result, can fall short of unlocking the full potential of container application platforms like Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. With Red Hat Container-Native Storage 3.6, Red Hat demonstrates its leadership as a provider of native storage for container platforms with the following new features: Versatile storage platform for containers enabling customers to manage, scale, and upgrade their storage needs using a single control plane helping customers to achieve greater storage efficiency and cost savings. Red Hat Container-Native Storage now offers support for file, block, and object interfaces, enabling container applications portability to the container platform without change. The addition of block storage (via iSCSI) provides support for distributed databases and other low-latency workloads like Elasticsearch, while the addition of object storage (under Technology Preview) provides an embedded object store within Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform for cloud-native applications needing Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) like protocol support. Support for all core infrastructure elements of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, including its registry, logging, and metrics. Support for these core components enables storage administrators to have Red Hat Container-Native Storage for infrastructure out-of-the-box, without needing to use disparate storage systems for different infrastructure aspects and have one integrated platform with simplified management, procurement, and support. Three-fold increase in the number of applications and microservices deployed on a single storage cluster.1 Increased persistent volume density offers customers greater resource utilization. Test Drive Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform with Container-Native Storage Red Hat is also rolling out a new OpenShift Container Platform with Container-Native Storage Test Drive, enabling customers to simulate Red Hat OpenShift deployments via the public cloud. This Test Drive aims to provide an inquiring administrator with a full multi-node Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cluster, running in the cloud. Customers will be able to explore lab exercises designed to expose them to different administrative and operational tasks with both Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Container-Native Storage.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171005005114/en/Red-Hat-Debuts-Versatile-Software-Defined-Storage-Cloud-Native

Red Hat opens new OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service public cloud

Infrastructure-as-a-Service ( #IaaS ) public clouds are commonplace. We all know #Amazon Web Services ( #AWS ), #Microsoft #Azure, and #Google Compute Engine. Platforms-as-a-Service ( #PaaS ) that enable you to build cloud-native applications are rarer. #RedHat is changing this with its new release of Red Hat #OpenShift Online (RHOO). RHOO is based on OpenShift, which is Red Hat's private PaaS cloud, but this is more than just a PaaS. Red Hat is providing an enterprise-ready container platform based on integrated Docker containers, which run on Red Hat Enterprise #Linux (RHEL) and are managed by Kubernetes. RHOO runs on AWS. While AWS runs globally, RHOO's Stater plan is available on AWS US East and West. The Pro plan is only available on US East for now. It will soon be available in EMEA and APAC.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/red-hat-opens-new-openshift-platform-as-a-service-public-cloud/

Big Switch Networks Achieves Red Hat OpenShift Prime Designati

#RedHat Summit -- #BigSwitch Networks®, The Next-Generation Data Center Networking Company announced today it has received Red Hat #OpenShift #Container Platform Prime designation. The company will be at Red Hat Summit May 2nd - 4th to demo support for Red Hat solutions including: Red Hat #OpenStack® Platform, Red Hat #Ceph®, Red Hat Enterprise #Linux®, #Ansible by Red Hat and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform with its data center switching fabric, Big Cloud Fabric ( #BCF ). To learn more, visit Big Switch at BOOTH #303. Big Switch will also participate at the Red Hat Telco NFV Mini Summit, Sunday, 5/7 (immediately following Red Hat Summit). Gregg Holzrichter, CMO, Big Switch Networks will discuss the findings of ACG Research's study: Creating Agility & Efficiency at Scale: The Economic Advantages of Open Architecture Platforms in NFV Deployments (more details on this study below). Big Cloud Fabric has achieved Prime designation for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. BCF with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform dramatically simplifies container networking by offering unified physical and virtual networking. Application teams are able to leverage BCF to painlessly deploy container-based applications without having to worry about detailed networking configuration.

http://news.sys-con.com/node/4070581

Red Hat's cloud love affair

Sure, #RedHat is a major #Linux company. Indeed, most would say it's the Linux company, but moving forward, what Red Hat wants to be is the private cloud company.

Red Hat's annual gathering of developers, customers, and partners, Red Hat Summit, in Boston proves this point. What's the biggest news coming out of the conference? According to Red Hat it's that "this week alone, more than two dozen enterprise customers are at Red Hat Summit to speak about their production deployments on OpenShift."

http://www.zdnet.com/article/red-hats-cloud-love-affair/

Red Hat Rolls Out OpenShift Container Platform 3.4

#RedHat just launched Red Hat #OpenShiftContainer Platform 3.4. It's based on #RedHatEnterpriseLinux, plus #Kubernetes 1.4 and the #Docker container runtime. The goal is to deploy container-based applications an microservices on a "a stable, reliable and more secure enterprise platform." Here's how Red Hat describes some of the new features: Next-level container storage with support for dynamic storage provisioning, allowing multiple storage types to be provisioned, and multi-tier storage exposure via quality-of-service labels in Kubernetes. Container-native storage, enabled by Red Hat Gluster Storage, which now supports dynamic provisioning and push button deployment, enhances the user experience running stateful and stateless applications on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. It makes the consumption and provisioning of application storage easier for developers to use. With Red Hat Gluster Storage, OpenShift customers get the added benefit of a software-defined, highly available and scalable storage solution that works across on-premises and public cloud environments and one that can be more cost efficient than traditional hardware-based or cloud-only storage services.

https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2017/01/26/red-hat-rolls-out-openshift-container-platform-3_4.aspx?m=1

Red Hat Breaks Down Barriers to Enterprise Container Adoption with Dynamic Storage Provisioning in Latest Version of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

RALEIGH, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- #RedHat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of #opensource solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat #OpenShiftContainerPlatform 3.4, the latest version of its container application platform. Red Hat helps organizations like Discovery Health and Pioneer better embrace new technologies, such as #Linux containers, that can deliver innovative business applications and services without sacrificing existing IT investments. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.4 provides a platform for this innovation while retaining a focus on existing mission-critical workloads, offering dynamic storage provisioning for both traditional and cloud-native applications and multi-tenant capabilities that can support multiple applications, teams and deployment processes in a hybrid cloud environment.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170118005694/en/Red-Hat-Breaks-Barriers-Enterprise-Container-Adoption

Red Hat Updates Enterprise Container Platform

#RedHat announced on Sept. 22 #OpenShift Container Platform 3.3 as well as a new project called Open Container Initiative Daemon (OCID) in a bid to optimize enterprise container deployments in production. OpenShift Container Platform 3.3—Red Hat's platform-as-a-service ( #PaaS ) offering—is the latest evolution of a product that Red Hat rebranded in July. It was formerly known as OpenShift Enterprise. OpenShift underwent an overhaul in version 3, becoming a container-based system using the open-source #Kubernetes container orchestration system. Among the core elements in OpenShift Container Platform 3.3 is Kubernetes 1.3, which was released in July. Red Hat also integrated the #Docker Engine, though it isn't using the most recent 1.12 release. Instead, OpenShift Container Platform 3.3 uses Docker 1.10, which is included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), along with Red Hat's patches and backported fixes, said Joe Fernandes, director of product management for OpenShift at Red Hat. Red Hat also ships the latest Docker 1.12 packages in RHEL for users who want to use newer features of Docker, he said. "We will update OpenShift to Docker 1.12 when Kubernetes supports it, likely in the Kubernetes 1.4/OpenShift 3.4 release, which will be out later this year," Fernandes told eWEEK. The big new feature in Docker 1.12 is swarm mode, which provides integrated clustering and container orchestration capabilities. Fernandes said that Red Hat currently has no plans on using Docker Swarm, as Red Hat is focused on Kubernetes to provide scalable, enterprise-ready container orchestration and management. Red Hat did a thorough assessment of the container orchestration landscape before it chose to back Kubernetes, according to Fernandes. Red Hat's assessment found that Kubernetes has advantages in the areas of integrated service discovery, declarative health management, scheduling capabilities and storage orchestration support for running stateful applications. Kubernetes originally was a Google project, but is now run under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which itself is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. "Today Red Hat is second only to Google in contributions and provides an enterprise distribution of Kubernetes in OpenShift, but Kubernetes is also backed by a strong community of vendors and committers, and by CNCF as the neutral governance body," Fernandes said. "While other container orchestration solutions like Swarm, Mesos and others exist, we are happy with our decision and feel that Kubernetes is becoming a de facto standard for container orchestration in the industry." Networking is also part of the OpenShift Container Platform. Fernandes explained that OpenShift provides an integrated, software-defined networking (SDN) solution based on Open vSwitch and VXLAN that provides multitenant container networking. "Multitenant means that customers can run multiple applications on the platform and have them isolated from each other via Kubernetes namespaces," he said. "OpenShift also works with our SDN partners to integrate their SDN solutions with OpenShift as an alternative via the Kubernetes container networking interface." In addition, OpenShift provides an integrated, routing solution with HAProxy that provides inbound request routing/load balancing out of the box, Fernandes said. "We also work with partners like F5, Nginx, Cisco and others to integrate their routing and load balancing solutions as an alternative," he said. "Our goal for OpenShift is to provide fully pluggable interfaces so customers can select the solutions of their choice." Part of the Docker upstream open-source effort is the Nautilus project that provides security scanning of container images. Red Hat doesn't participate in the Nautilus project, choosing instead to support other container security effort. "We have introduced new projects around both container image signing (Simple Signing) and container scanning (Atomic Scan) and are working with both the upstream Linux and Docker communities and partners like Black Duck on these initiatives," Fernandes said. "These capabilities will be available in RHEL in the upcoming 7.3 release and will be integrated with OpenShift as well in a future release so customers can drive policy-based decisions for execution based on signing and scanning results." Looking beyond just Docker, Red Hat is now also leading a new effort called Open Container Initiative Daemon that aims to provide an optimized container engine for Kubernetes. "The OCID project is aimed at exploring new innovations in container runtime, image distribution, storage, signing and more, with an emphasis on driving container standards through the Open Container Initiative (OCI)," Dan Walsh, consulting engineer at Red Hat, told eWEEK. The OCI is an effort that got underway in June 2015 as a way to define container standards. OCI has continued to evolve, defining the runC container runtime standard. Walsh emphasized that OCID is not an effort to replace Docker Engine. Rather, OCID is part of Red Hat's continued efforts to evolve containers capabilities so they can be used in development, test and production environments, he said. "Red Hat is a leader in both contributions to Docker and OCI and is committed to driving both innovation and standards in the containers space," Walsh said.

http://mobile.eweek.com/cloud/red-hat-updates-enterprise-container-platform.html