Red Hat updates dev tools, empowers use of hybrid and multicloud

Red Hat has unveiled updates across its portfolio of developer tools, designed to help organisations build and deliver applications faster and more consistently across Kubernetes-based hybrid and multicloud environments.

The company states it is delivering new capabilities that further take advantage of Git, an open source version control system, to simplify development and deployment across hybrid multicloud environments.

The latest release of Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines introduces a technology preview of pipelines as code for Tekton, which gives customers the ability to define and manage their continuous integration (CI) pipelines through Git repositories and take advantage of GitOps workflows to bring greater repeatability, visibility and consistency to the application lifecycle.

With new Tekton Chains, OpenShift Pipelines now provides built-in image signing capabilities that help to improve reliability in the application delivery supply chain, according to the company.

Developers can also take advantage of user namespaces in pipelines to isolate tools that require root privileges, and run them as non-root inside their application build and delivery pipelines without compromising on security functionality.

Using OpenShift GitOps, customers can declaratively manage their OpenShift clusters, applications and compliance operations, using familiar Git workflows to automate, define and version security practices in an easily auditable environment.

The latest release includes Argo CD 2.3, bringing new sync and diff strategies, UI improvements, and performance enhancements.

ApplicationSets, which was previously available as a technology preview, is now generally available providing a fully supported and stable way to automate management of multiple ArgoCD applications across multiple clusters. In addition, ApplicationSets is also now fully integrated with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management.

Red Hat also unveiled its next-generation in-browser and local development environments, Red Hat OpenShift DevSpaces 3 (formerly Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces) and Red Hat OpenShift Local 2 (formerly Red Hat CodeReady Containers).

These represent the next generation of its in-browser and local development environments for Red Hat OpenShift, the enterprise Kubernetes platform.

OpenShift Dev Spaces uses OpenShift and containers to provide development or IT teams with a consistent and zero-configuration development environment that is built to support security needs.

OpenShift Dev Spaces 3 builds on the work done through CodeReady Workspaces, providing:

• A new DevWorkspace engine replaces the Java REST service from CodeReady Workspaces with a Kubernetes controller that runs behind the kube-apiserver, offering greater scalability and high availability.
• A universal API, provided a Kubernetes-native DevWorkspace CRD, better aligns with typical resource management used in Kubernetes environments.
• A simpler design is achieved by decoupling the workspace engine from the developers IDE and server-side components of the OpenShift Dev Spaces service.

OpenShift Local offers one of the quickest ways to get started building OpenShift clusters, Red Hat states. Designed to run on a local computer, the tool simplifies setup and testing and gives developers the ability to emulate the cloud development environment locally with all the tools needed to develop container-based applications.

According to Red Hat, OpenShift Local 2 builds on the work done through CodeReady Containers with new features and enhancements, such as:

• Presets, which enable developers to select either the default local OpenShift bundle or Podman if they want to start with a more focused container runtime to help minimise development setup.
• Slimmer binaries resulting from a decoupling of the OpenShift machine bundle from the command-line tool download. This not only results in smaller bundles when using tools like Podman, but also gives developers greater flexibility to choose alternate bundles that better fit their specific project.
• A new system tray delivers more consistency and capability across different operating systems by giving users the ability to quickly view and manage the status of a machine, open the OpenShift console, change the configuration or access version information.

Red Hat has also made updates to a number of other areas in the developer portfolio:

• Docker Desktop now includes a new extension, available as a developer preview, that enables users to deploy a container image to OpenShift.
• Shipwright, the open source extensible framework for building container images for Kubernetes, now offers volume support, a greater range of options for customisation, and the ability for users to build images from the local directory.
• Knative/Serverless Functions tooling enables developers working in VS Code or IntelliJ to view and deploy serverless applications from within the development environment.
• odo 3.0, a CLI tool for developers writing and deploying applications on OpenShift and Kubernetes, received a major update focused on guided on-boarding, the outer loop development experience, and devfile adoption for consistency across the portfolio.
• Devfile is now a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sandbox project. The Kubernetes-native API is used to define containerised development environments and has been adopted for use in odo, OpenShift Web Console, OpenShift Dev Spaces and various IDE plugins.

Red Hat vice president and general manager, Developer Tools and Programs, Mithun Dhar, says, "For developers on the front lines of business transformation today, speed, agility, scale and performance are of utmost importance.

"As the pace of innovation accelerates, developers not only face increasing pressure to deliver new applications and services to market faster, they also have to update and maintain existing applications.

"In some cases, this means deploying new code multiple times each day. We want to make it as easy as possible for developers to meet these challenges with tools and capabilities that help them work more efficiently and productively.