Red Hat has released the latest version of its hybrid cloud management platform in addition to updating its SaaS analytics offering at the company’s conference in San Francisco.
The latest version of the platform, CloudForms 4.1, sees it now capable of supporting the three largest public cloud offerings in the market, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
The addition of support for these offerings plays to Red Hat’s desire to be a key player in the hybrid cloud market and by supporting the three largest players in the public cloud field, it adds significant weight to the company’s product.
Expanding on the support for these clouds, the company has added support for software defined networking to bring network management for OpenStack networking in Neutron. The addition of support for Google Cloud Platform is designed to add flexibility of choice for customers.
The company has also added in greater automation capabilities with the integration of Ansible Tower. This should make it easier for users to provision complex applications and services through custom automation code.
Expanded support for Microsoft Azure has been added with greater support for Azure cloud images, events, metrics, provisioning from private images, and full lifecycle management.
To further develop its portfolio of services, Red Hat has updated Insights, its SaaS analytics platform. Insights will now offer full container workload analysis, updated OpenStack cloud capabilities, and an Actions Insight Planner to add customisation to task assignments.
Container workload analysis is aimed to provide greater operations visibility in order to more safely adopt containers. The functionality will be able to identify risks on different levels of the users’ infrastructure, including service configuration within an image, tuning and configuration of container storage for optimal performance, and filesystem monitoring that should help to ensure registry functionality.
Insights now also offers real-time, full-stack analysis of OpenStack based private clouds and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation environments. The company says that this will extend its analysis to multiple OpenStack nodes to enable continuous private cloud infrastructure assessment.
Joe Fitzgerald, VP, Management, Red Hat, said: "We are seeing cloud-based service deployments continuing to grow in scale and complexity, as well as increasing adoption of container based-services.
"This can put pressure on IT organizations to rapidly evolve their operational capabilities. We have expanded the depth and breadth of analytics in Red Hat Insights to support these new environments and services to enable them to reach their business goals.
"With this latest version of Red Hat Insights, we extend cloud management capabilities to containers and OpenStack based private clouds."
Further features have been added to the Insights Dashboard to help teams to identify and assign remediation tasks individually or in groups. This means that IT organisations will be able to more easily document the remediation process and, "move from intelligence to action," while remaining compliant, the company said.
Customers will be able to create their own custom remediation plans as well as use Insights recommended plans.
The final enhancement is Insights Early Access mode, an opt-in modality that the company says will give users visibility into upcoming new features and allow them to test out functionality and give feedback, it is kind of like an early access beta capability for upcoming features.
