Red Hat OpenShift 4.21: Smarter scaling, faster migration, and AI-powered efficiency

Red Hat OpenShift 4.21 is designed to run AI training jobs, containerized microservices, and virtualized applications on your private, hosted, or hybrid infrastructure. With this new release, you can modernize your IT infrastructure and accelerate innovation on a single platform that scales with your business demand. A lot of work has gone into improving upon the previous 4.20 release without disrupting your daily routine, so there's a lot to explore. Here's a quick overview of all the new features in OpenShift 4.21.

Operators and AI assistance

OpenShift 4.21 has several features to help your systems become more efficient without overhauling what you already have. For example, the JobSet operator enables teams to orchestrate distributed workloads using existing GitOps workflows and RBAC policies.

The new Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) operator allows you to prioritize high-end GPUs for AI training when you need performance, and save costs by automatically shifting or scaling those resources down when they're not needed. DRA provides intelligent GPU allocation, attribute-based GPU allocation, admin access based on namespace, and prioritized alternatives in device requests, enhancing the flexibility and efficiency of GPU resource management.

Red Hat OpenShift 4.21 also introduces several AI-focused features, including the Red Hat build of Kueue 1.2, which supports KubeFlow Trainer v2 and provides a visibility API for pending workloads. And Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed can give you contextual, AI-powered insights for tasks like troubleshooting virtual machine (VM) errors, with no need to switch between user interfaces or to manually upload files for AI analysis.

Read the full article for more information.

New features for developers

The latest update to Red Hat Developer Hub introduces a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and an OpenShift AI connector so platform engineers can integrate software catalogs and AI assets directly into an organization's internal developer portal (IDP). Red Hat Developer Lightspeed, a set of intelligent assistants for Red Hat developer tools, is now based on the Llama Stack framework for greater flexibility, and the MCP server allows AI agents to access your Red Hat Developer Hub software catalog and technical documentation to provide context-aware answers. Thanks to this integration, the OpenShift AI connector syncs AI models and assets with your Red Hat Developer Hub catalog.

There's also localization support, starting with French language translations, and persona-based homepages that let you tailor views for different users. Additionally, the Dynamic Plug-in Factory allows you to simplify custom plug-in development. The onboarding experience has been streamlined with a new quickstart option for developers, and expanded import capabilities to support GitLab.

For those developing on the cloud in Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces, the new release supports nested containers so you can use podman run without the need for workarounds like Kubedock. VS Code local to remote is now available, so you can run code, an IDE server, extensions, and compute on Red Hat OpenShift while your local VS Code application serves as a thin client.

Protecting the supply chain

The developer supply chain is another important topic, one that Red Hat Trusted Artifact Signer, a production-ready deployment of the Sigstore project, can address. Use it for cryptographic signing, attestation, and verification for your enterprise software artifacts. Every component in your pipeline can be verified for integrity and nonrepudiation.

Software supply chain 1.8 (part of Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite) helps you set up a secure development environment, with ready-to-use templates in Red Hat Developer Hub that help you build safer CI/CD pipelines. It also uses OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication rather than GitHub.

Red Hat OpenShift GitOps

Red Hat OpenShift GitOps 1.19 features Argo CD Agent architecture for a pull-based deployment model offering better scalability and security for multicluster environments. The Argo CD Image Updater in technical preview allows you to automate container image updates for your applications.

Additionally, operations teams now have precision control over image pull policies across all components, and can manage their own notification configurations without needing control plane access.

There's lots more, so read the full article for more information.

Hosted control planes and resource management

Traditionally, setting up Kubernetes was focused on provisioning enough capacity to meet demand. However, this approach is being replaced by a new mindset that prioritizes adaptability and efficiency. The question is no longer how much capacity needs to be provisioned, but how infrastructure can automatically adapt to what an organization actually needs. The new resource-based control plane autoscaler in Red Hat OpenShift 4.21 doesn't infer load requirements from node count;instead, it observes actual resource consumption,based specifically on kube-apiserver’s memory use.

This is intelligent scaling, and with it your infrastructure mitigates cost, increases reliability, and reduces the workloads of platform teams. Intelligent scaling allows infrastructure to automatically adjust to changing demands, eliminating the need for manual intervention and reducing the risk of idle resources. The goal of this evolution is to make infrastructure efficient, scalable, and cost-effective. By automating scaling and optimizing resource usage, organizations can run Red Hat OpenShift at any scale while only paying for what they actually use. This approach not only improves performance and reliability but also promotes sustainability by reducing waste and minimizing environmental impact.

Read the full article for more information.

Integration with Oracle Database Appliance

Red Hat OpenShift 4.21 continues to expand the reach of enterprise Kubernetes into Oracle's infrastructure portfolio. Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) is designed to simplify Oracle Database deployments for small to medium organizations and in distributed environments, and bringing Red Hat OpenShift to ODA means you can modernize your application layer. Now you can deploy cloud-native workloads on Red Hat OpenShift while keeping your critical Oracle databases where they are.

ODA combines optimized hardware and software into a single appliance that delivers end-to-end automation, high availability with Oracle Real Application Clusters, and reduced licensing costs by allowing Oracle Database licensing to start from as few as two CPU cores. It has been widely adopted across industries where organizations need reliable database infrastructure without the complexity and overhead of building and managing it themselves.

Are you running ODA and Red Hat OpenShift? Learn more about the benefits you can gain with OpenShift 4.21.

Fast virtual machine migration

It keeps getting easier and easier to migrate your virtualization to Red Hat OpenShift. Version 2.11 of Red Hat's migration toolkit for virtualization makes storage offload migrations available, so you can move critical VM workloads quickly with minimal downtime. 

This feature uses your existing storage systems instead of the network eliminating bandwidth constraints that sometimes slow migrations. Internal testing conducted by Hitachi shows that these migrations can run up to 10 times faster than traditional network migrations (actual results may vary by environment). That means a 10-hour migration window could potentially be reduced to just one hour, freeing up network resources for production traffic.

Read the full article for step-by-step VM migration instructions, starting with the creation of a migration plan in OpenShift 4.21.

Shift to OpenShift 4.21

There are even more features than the ones I've mentioned in this article, and of course Red Hat OpenShift continues to innovate in ways designed to make your organization more efficient and resilient. Keep an eye on the Red Hat OpenShift product page to stay up to date on developments throughout the year!