It has been a busy, productive year for Red Hat Runtimes, and we are excited to kick off 2021 with new features. Red Hat Runtimes, part of the Application Services portfolio, is a set of products, tools and components designed to develop and maintain cloud-native applications. It offers lightweight runtimes and frameworks that allow developers to build highly-distributed cloud architectures, like microservices. With Red Hat Runtimes, developers have options to choose the right tool for the job - they are not locked in to only one runtime or service.
Here’s a rundown of what’s new.
Expanded support for Quarkus
Quarkus, released last year, is a technology that optimizes Java in containerized environments. It utilizes novel compile time boot optimizations to significantly reduce both memory footprint and boot time, as well creating a very productive developer experience. Red Hat recently announced that Quarkus support is now included with a subscription to Red Hat OpenShift. This brings Quarkus developer productivity features like live coding, remote development, reactive & imperative programming models, support for MicroProfile, and a catalog of 300-plus extensions to the premier hybrid cloud development platform with Red Hat OpenShift.
To make it easier to migrate existing Java applications to Quarkus on OpenShift, the Red Hat Migration Toolkit for Applications has been updated to include new rulesets to help analyze and recommend paths to modernize and migrate Java applications (such as Spring Boot) to Quarkus on OpenShift, to better prepare for the hybrid cloud.
JBoss EAP XP 2.0
Following on the heels of its first release, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform expansion pack (JBoss EAP XP or EAP XP) 2.0 has been released, which brings new support for bootable JAR MicroProfile applications. This is important as most MicroProfile APIs already assume there is only one application running per Java Virtual Machine (JVM), as opposed to EAP itself, which can host multiple applications. Building bootable JAR files that can be run as standalone Java applications (e.g. java -jar myapp.jar) is also preferred by many of our container-focused customers as it provides an intuitive user experience when running in containers. Check out the EAP XP 2.0 Release Notes for more information.
Red Hat Runtimes support for IBM Power Systems
With this update, we are working to enable most Red Hat Runtimes components to run on IBM Power Systems. This enables users to choose what is best for them based on the task. Newly supported distributions include:
- Universal base images for Red Hat Runtimes deployments will have Eclipse OpenJ9, rather than OpenJDK images, to be compatible with IBM Power Systems.
- Container distributions on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for IBM Power Systems and OpenJ9 for JBoss EAP, Red Hat JBoss Web Server (Tomcat), Red Hat Single Sign-On (SSO), and Data Grid
- Kubernetes Operators for JBoss EAP, Single Sign-On and AMQ Broker. Data Grid is on the horizon.
- Testing of the cloud-native runtimes (Quarkus, Spring Boot, Node.js, Vert.x and Thorntail) for RHEL for IBM Power Systems and OpenJ9
This update brings the option of Red Hat Runtimes to an even wider base of customers, and along with previously announced support for IBM Z-Series, enables IBM Power Systems customers to take advantage of their investments with additional choices for runtimes.
OpenShift Serverless Functions (Developer Preview)
OpenShift Serverless Functions enables developers to create and deploy stateless, event-driven functions as a Knative service on OpenShift Container Platform. Along with Serving and Eventing, Functions completes the Serverless offering with the necessary constructs developers need to build modern cloud-native applications. Available as a technology preview feature as part of the OpenShift Serverless 1.11 release, OpenShift Serverless Functions is important to Runtimes customers as it supports two of our runtimes, namely Quarkus and Node.js, which are both very well suited for high scale, highly productive development of serverless applications.
For more information, check out this demo, read the preview docs, or create your first serverless function with Red Hat OpenShift Serverless Functions.
Additional Updates
We are also happy to note that the latest version of Red Hat Runtimes brings our support of Spring Boot up to Spring Boot 2.3.4. This release includes new Spring Boot OAuth2 Client and Resource Server starters, making it easier to integrate Spring Boot apps with Red Hat Single Sign-On. It also includes a new version of Dekorate with a technology preview of build hooks to easily deploy Spring Boot apps to OpenShift.
In addition to the above, we are also happy to announce the completion of the certification of Red Hat Runtimes on Red Hat OpenShift 4.6. This is significant as OpenShift 4.6 has an extended lifecycle of updates and is a great choice for customers interested in long term investments in their cloud native development platform.
These features are now available for customers and can be found in the Red Hat Customer Portal.
About the author
James Falkner is a technology evangelist, teacher, learner, author and dedicated to open source and open computing. He works at Red Hat as a technical marketing director for Red Hat's cloud native application runtimes and loves learning from others, and occasionally teaching at conferences. He's been doing this for the last two decades, and is a Computer Engineering graduate of the University of Florida.
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