Red Hat got its annual conference underway in San Francisco this week and took the opportunity to release a number of updates and key product developments in the fields of containers and storage, while some of the companies that connect with the Red Hat ecosystem also revealed some advancements.
CBR highlights the big news from the conference.
1. Container scanning
In order to help make containers ready for the enterprise to use, Red Hat has added a scanning interface to enable security partners to plug into the company’s OpenShift Container Platform.
The company has integrated with multiple container scanners by making use of its partner network. For example, Black Duck Software is now fully integrated and supported as a container scanner.
The idea is to make it easier for users to be able to see what is running inside their containers and whether the latest security updates have been applied.
2. Gluster storage
Continuing the container focus, Red Hat revealed that it is aiming to make it easier for developers to provision and manage persistent storage for stateful applications running in Linux containers by offering container native persistent storage for Linux containers.
The capability is integrated with the company’s OpenShift Container Platform with the aim of being able to deploy applications and storage in a converged manner where storage is served from containers.
The idea is to eliminate the need to have an independent storage cluster, something that the company says will help improve efficiency and lower costs.
Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.13 will offer a single control plane with Kubernetes in OpenShift Container Platform.
3. OpenShift Primed
Another container development sees the company introduce OpenShift Primed, a partner designation that aims to recognise a growing number of partners in development with OpenShift and give customers better visibility into the solutions that are being built around the container application platform.
The company says that it is a "technical readiness program" which is aimed at recognising the first steps of an ISV integrating its applications into OpenShift, and the steps these ISV’s take as they move towards Red Hat Container Certification.
To qualify, ISV’s must submit technical evidence showing integration with any variant of OpenShift.
4. JBoss
Red Hat released the enterprise application platform, JBoss 7, to general availability and introduced JBoss Core Services Collection, a set of technologies that provide customers with common application components.
The company said that with the latest version it is aiming to help enterprises to use and extend their existing applications as they begin to transition to emerging architectures and programming paradigms.
The core services collection offers things such as Web single sign-on, HTTP load balancing, and proxying, as well as management and monitoring capabilities for applications and services.
Sticking with JBoss, CloudBees revealed that its Jenkins Platform now supports integrations with JBoss and OpenShift across the software delivery pipeline, the aim is to enable developers to build, test, and deploy applications using OpenShift and run on JBoss.
5. Language server protocol
As collaboration is extremely important to open source and Red Hat, it is no surprise that some of the news coming from the conference is focused around partnerships.
With that in mind, Red Hat, Codenvy, and Microsoft revealed the adoption of a language server protocol project that represents a collaborative effort to provide a common way to integrate programming languages across code editors and integrated development environments.
The protocol is designed to extend develop flexibility and productivity by providing a variety of tools with different programming languages.
The Language Server Protocol is an open source project that defines a JSON based data exchange protocol for language servers, hosted on GitHub and licensed under the creative commons and MIT licenses.
