Red Hat launches new features to unite developers and IT ops

Red Hat has launched OpenShift GitOps and OpenShift Pipelines, new features of Red Hat OpenShift, the company's enterprise Kubernetes platform.

These capabilities are designed to help organisations to further reduce friction between development and operations teams by streamlining application development and deployment across the hybrid cloud, the company states.

DevOps methodologies promote a cultural shift by linking the work of development and operations teams into a more unified approach rather than separate silos, helping to bring applications to production more quickly.

However, according to Red Hat, many organisations still struggle in fully converting to DevOps, especially as much of the associated tooling is workflow- or software-specific, leading to disparate approaches across teams.

OpenShift GitOps and OpenShift Pipelines help to unite application development and IT operations, bringing the teams together earlier in the development process while also delivering greater security, predictability and visibility throughout the entire application lifecycle.

OpenShift GitOps

OpenShift GitOps takes a developer-centric approach to building applications, using the Git repository as the single source of truth for both developers and operations teams.

OpenShift GitOps, built from the open source Argo CD project, enables IT teams to implement GitOps workflows for cluster configuration and application delivery.

By implementing a GitOps framework, updates and changes are pushed through declarative code, automating infrastructure and deployment requirements, and CI/CD, helping organisations to realise faster, more secure, scalable software development.

Additionally, OpenShift GitOps increases visibility into the state of clusters and applications and corrects deviations from the desired state if needed.

The capability enables teams to have full visibility and traceability into changes rolled out to clusters, as every change is represented in the Git repository.

OpenShift Pipelines

Based on the Tekton open source project, OpenShift Pipelines is designed to run each step of the CI/CD pipeline in its own container and allows each step to scale independently to meet the demands of the pipeline.

For an operations team that is trying to optimise its infrastructure resources, limiting the resources required to support pipelines during quiet periods helps reduce the cost and overhead for running the pipeline the developers need.

OpenShift Pipelines provides a streamlined experience, enabling full control over a teams delivery pipeline, plugins and access control with no central CI/CD server to manage.

Availability

OpenShift GitOps and OpenShift Pipelines are now available through the OperatorHub for subscribers to all Managed OpenShift services and the self-managed OpenShift Container Platform and OpenShift Platform Plus running Red Hat OpenShift 4.7 and higher.

Expert commentary

Red Hat senior vice president Cloud Platforms Ashesh Badani says, "With OpenShift GitOps and OpenShift Pipelines, we are working to remove the false wall between developers and IT operations, enabling the teams to work together earlier in the application development process.

"This not only helps to find and prevent defects more quickly in the software delivery process, but also streamlines the process as a whole by providing increased visibility and security across the lifecycle.