Accelerate app development with Red Hat OpenShift

May 11, 2026•
Resource type: E-book
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Introduction

Across industries, organizations are solving the toughest business challenges with innovative applications. 

Organizations need to deliver differentiated software solutions that increase customer engagement, revenue, and competitive advantage in changing markets. To advance innovation and sustain a strategic position, operations teams are under pressure to improve time to value—without compromising security. And yet, inefficient infrastructure management and deployment workflows often slow development processes and make it difficult for teams to adopt the latest tools and technologies. 

A combination of cloud-native infrastructure, unified development tools, and AI integration is critical to building a flexible, secure application platform. Modern application platforms should bring together integrated capabilities and a rich ecosystem of technologies to streamline the development and operation of applications and AI workloads across hybrid cloud environments. Commonly delivered as either cloud services or self-managed installations, application platforms can help teams build and modernize applications using advanced architectures and technologies. 

Based on open standards, Red Hat® OpenShift® delivers a comprehensive, modern application platform that helps organizations build, accelerate, and scale both traditional and AI-powered workloads—with built-in security and compliance features. It brings together a set of tools and services that streamline the entire application lifecycle, from code to development to delivery to the management of application workloads across hybrid cloud environments. 

Platform engineering teams gain the visibility and control they need to manage and scale both development and production environments with automated and consistent security guardrails for developers. Developers can innovate faster with a complete set of services for bringing applications to market on your choice of infrastructure. Built-in security features help development and operations teams work together to avoid delays. For leadership, this unified platform helps ensure strategic alignment, reduces tool sprawl, and provides the security and stability needed for large-scale innovation.

Red Hat was named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic QuadrantTM for Cloud-Native Application Platforms.1

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Innovate on a comprehensive application platform

Built on the trusted foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux®, Red Hat OpenShift provides a unified, security-focused platform that optimizes modern application development across hybrid cloud environments—including on-site infrastructure, public cloud resources, and edge devices. 

Integrations with a broad partner ecosystem spanning major cloud providers, certified software vendors, and global system integrators, let you use your choice of technologies to build, accelerate, and scale a variety of applications through a single, consistent development experience. Plus, Red Hat OpenShift is available as either a self-managed product or as a managed cloud service from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud.

Build applications with security from the start

Build in any language with curated, trusted images and self-service developer environments to increase productivity. 

Accelerate delivery across a hybrid cloud

Continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD)2, GitOps3, service mesh, observability, and security tools help rapidly move applications to production. 

Scale any application on any infrastructure

Run containers, virtual machines4 (VMs), serverless workloads, and AI-powered applications on a unified platform across the hybrid cloud, from on-premise datacenters to the edge.

Red Hat OpenShift architecture diagram showing layers on hybrid cloud infrastructure

Figure 1. Application development with Red Hat OpenShift.

5 ways Red Hat OpenShift accelerates application development

1. Scale AI readiness

The right toolset, based on both open source projects and commercial solutions, can help development teams create innovative applications and deliver intelligent solutions more quickly. By staying current with new tools and technologies, you can reduce costs and create more effective solutions that benefit from the latest features, optimization techniques, and algorithms.

To help platform administrators and site reliability engineers (SREs) manage and scale these AI-intensive environments, Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed is integrated directly into the Red Hat OpenShift web console. This gen AI-powered virtual assistant supports operations by providing step-by-step guidance, rapid troubleshooting support, and complex configuration advice through natural language queries. This streamlined platform management helps you maintain consistent, high-performing environments, allowing you to accelerate the entire AI solution development and deployment lifecycle.

However, software is only part of the equation. Graphics processing units (GPUs) are expensive, often sit idle, and, because they’re physical hardware, are challenging to share across teams. As a result, you can face resource hoarding and high cloud bills during times of peak demand. By moving from per-token application programming interface (API) costs to owning optimized, private infrastructure, you can achieve a competitive cost advantage while maintaining complete control over your hardware.

To help you navigate this shift, Red Hat OpenShift incorporates advanced orchestration features to evolve your environments from simple, stateless cloud applications to complex, state-aware, and resource-intensive AI workloads. With features like dynamic resource allocation, a single physical GPU can be partitioned and shared across multiple inference jobs or developer workspaces, helping prevent hardware resource waste.

Red Hat OpenShift AI operates on top of Red Hat OpenShift to provide an AI platform for building, training, tuning, deploying, and monitoring AI-powered applications and predictive and foundation models at scale across hybrid cloud environments. Red Hat OpenShift AI helps accelerate AI innovation, promote operational consistency, and optimize access to resources when implementing trusted AI solutions. It delivers a consistent, streamlined, and automated experience when handling the workload and performance demands of enterprise AI projects. For developers, Red Hat OpenShift AI provides core features such as AI and machine learning (ML) libraries, ML pipelines, and integrated development environment (IDE) support for predictive models, along with InstructLab and hardware acceleration for augmenting large language models (LLMs).

diagram of how Red Hat OpenShift brings continuous MLOps and DevOps loops together on a single platform to help build AI applications efficiently

Figure 2. Red Hat OpenShift brings continuous MLOps and DevOps loops together on a single platform to help build AI applications efficiently

2. Speed application development and boost productivity

For many organizations, rapidly delivering innovative new application features and critical updates is key to increasing customer satisfaction and gaining competitive advantages. By minimizing the time spent on infrastructure setup and application deployment, and maintaining access to tools and hybrid cloud resources, you can simplify and speed application lifecycles and quickly respond to changing user demands.

Red Hat OpenShift includes a comprehensive set of tools for building modern, cloud-native applications. It accelerates the deployment of microservices, serverless, and event-driven architectures with significantly reduced infrastructure management.

Consistent, self-service developer environments

Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces, a cloud development environment (CDE) service for Red Hat OpenShift, provides security-focused, zero-configuration workspaces that support consistency across teams. By defining environments as code using the devfile open standard, teams can eliminate local compatibility issues and move instantly from coding to testing. With built-in support for popular IDEs and a streamlined command line interface (CLI), developers can rapidly iterate on projects and push code directly to Red Hat OpenShift, accelerating the transition from a local concept to a running container.

Simplified management of supporting technologies

Red Hat OpenShift operators5 let you add and manage both Red Hat and certified third-party technologies from the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog—including databases and observability tools—directly in the Red Hat OpenShift console. Choose from a variety of integrated tools, fully supported and maintained by Red Hat, that address observability, networking, pipelines, GitOps, security, virtualization, and more. Choose the tools you prefer, and Red Hat takes care of compatibility and integration into Red Hat OpenShift. 

Run applications across your choice of infrastructure—cloud, datacenter, or at the edge. For organizations that want to offload the overhead and responsibility of infrastructure management, Red Hat OpenShift cloud services offer preconfigured tools, automated monitoring, single-click deployment, lifecycle management, and self-healing systems that allow you to focus on deploying applications from Day 1. Regardless of how organizations opt to implement Red Hat OpenShift or where they choose to deploy it, they can expect a consistent management experience with reliable and security-focused application deployment. 

Standardized inner loop for cloud-native and AI development

Accelerate development with Red Hat Desktop, a unified workstation experience that streamlines building, managing, and deploying containers and Kubernetes workloads across Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows. By integrating Red Hat build of Podman Desktop and Red Hat build of Cortex Hub, the solution standardizes the AI inner loop, providing a consistent Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based environment that mirrors production locally. This approach gives developers the localized power to serve LLMs with a focus on security via Cortex Hub. With Red Hat Desktop, teams can experiment with AI models and containerized applications on their own terms, knowing their local innovations will transition consistently to the Red Hat OpenShift cluster.

Unified portal for developer productivity and self-service infrastructure

Red Hat Developer Hub is an internal developer portal (IDP) based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation Backstage project and designed to reduce cognitive load and allow developers to innovate. By providing a unified view of the entire software ecosystem, it reduces context switching and the frustration of hunting for fragmented information.

Through software templates, platform teams can codify and automate complex configurations into Golden Paths6—curated, self-service workflows that provide a clear road to production. This approach allows developers to spin up compliant infrastructure in minutes, bypassing ticket delays and the need to build proficiency in every underlying tool. With integrated AI capabilities and a unified view of application health, Red Hat Developer Hub transforms the developer experience from managing infrastructure to delivering business value.

3. Modernize on your timeline

Application modernization projects help increase efficiency and agility for many organizations. By transitioning from traditional, monolithic application architectures to more modular, scalable, and cloud-native solutions, you can optimize operations and enhance user experiences. However, these projects can often present development challenges, including complex integration with existing systems, a lack of complete tool sets, and comprehensive training requirements.

Red Hat OpenShift includes a suite of migration and modernization tools that help you transition traditional, virtualized, and cloud-native applications to a unified platform:

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, an included feature of Red Hat OpenShift, brings VMs and containers together on a single, consistent platform. By managing traditional VM workloads alongside modern containers, you can apply consistent DevOps and GitOps practices across your entire estate. This unified view reduces operational complexity and supports your modernization of traditional applications to microservices at a pace that suits your business.

  • Red Hat OpenShift Serverless allows you to create scalable, event-driven, cloud-native serverless applications on Red Hat OpenShift. It simplifies the process of building, deploying, and managing serverless workloads, so you can focus on writing code without the overhead of infrastructure management. Features like serverless functions, autoscaling to 0, progressive rollouts, and event integrations make OpenShift Serverless a versatile choice for modern cloud-native applications.
  • Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh provides a consistent way to connect, manage, and observe microservices-based applications from on-site datacenters to public clouds and edge installations. Gain visibility into traffic flow and dependencies between services to identify issues across your hybrid cloud environment.

4. Optimize your path to production

To remain competitive, organizations must prioritize rapid and efficient application development and delivery. Automated processes let you introduce new features or updates more quickly, significantly reducing time to market. Streamlined deployment allows you to iterate more efficiently and refine your applications based on real-time feedback. Dynamic, automated application workflows enhance collaboration within and between development and IT operations teams. 

Red Hat OpenShift includes integrated developer tools and workflows to help you define and implement consistent, security-focused software development processes that speed application delivery. For example, you can take advantage of plugins, extensions, and software development kits (SDKs) to build applications. CI/CD and GitOps tools let you build, test, and deploy code using automated workflows. Monitoring and logging services let you track application performance and identify issues. And a container registry lets you efficiently store and manage container images.

  • Builds for Red Hat OpenShift lets you use a single Kubernetes API to assemble source code and binaries into a container image while abstracting the underlying tools and details typically required to build images.
  • Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines lets you create advanced, security-focused CI/CD workflows that incorporate your preferred source code repository. By running each step in a separate container, these workflows can automatically scale to meet demand.
  • Red Hat OpenShift GitOps allows you to integrate Git repositories into your pipelines, so you can define infrastructure and workload configurations using declarative code for efficient, reliable application delivery. It also helps you create repeatable, continuous delivery processes that use a single source of truth to build and deploy applications across clusters and at scale.
  • Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes provides the multicluster visibility, governance, and application lifecycle management needed to consistently scale deployments across your global fleet of OpenShift clusters.
  • The Red Hat OpenShift web console lets you manage your applications from a single location. Import existing codebases, images, and Dockerfiles to build and deploy applications directly on Red Hat OpenShift. Analyze processor, memory, and storage consumption to understand application performance. And access application status, logs, and events to see application state and troubleshoot issues.

5. Build applications with confidence

Safeguarding applications in hybrid cloud environments, while rapidly delivering digital services that meet user demand and business requirements, can be challenging for development teams. For many organizations, integrating security features that support data privacy and control access to meet compliance requirements is now a critical part of modern software development. Adopting end-to-end security strategies, automating Golden Paths, and adhering to evolving compliance standards can help you increase application integrity and build confidence with users and stakeholders.

Using continuous compliance and security checks throughout application lifecycles, Red Hat OpenShift delivers a scalable approach to protecting entire application stacks. As the operating system (OS) foundation, Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes security features such as Linux namespaces, Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux), Control Groups, and Secure Computing Mode (seccomp) to isolate and protect workloads. As an integrated container registry, it scans for vulnerabilities and cryptographically signs applications for trusted identification. Strong encryption controls help safeguard sensitive application data and operational capabilities—including authentication, authorization, and secret management—to provide trust between users and applications.

Continuous runtime security and policy enforcement

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes continuously scans your environment against industry-standard deployment and runtime policies to protect from malicious applications and misconfigurations. It integrates with DevOps and security tools and workflows to provide useful, context-rich guidelines that help you mitigate threats and apply security policies. The policy engine includes built-in controls to enforce DevOps and security-focused best practices based on industry standards—including Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmarks and National Institute of Standards Technology (NIST) guidelines. You can also automatically index and analyze images stored in Red Hat Quay registries with detailed access controls, giving you real-time reports about the latest Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) against vulnerability databases.

Automated security features and compliance across the software supply chain

Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite brings together Red Hat Developer Hub, Red Hat Trusted Profile Analyzer, Red Hat Trusted Artifact Signer, trusted libraries, and other components to customize and automate build pipelines, helping you adhere to signed attestations with detailed provenance. Deploy Pipelines as Code (PaC) to a declarative state with release policies that block suspicious builds from production. Advanced Developer Suite provides software templates with automated security checks and security-focused release workflows for deploying container images across environments. It automatically generates software bills of materials (SBOMs) for container images and provides provenance and attestations in line with Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) standards. These templates help you standardize and accelerate the adoption of security measures across the software development lifecycle, with increased trust and transparency from the start.

Advanced Developer Suite is modular in design, so you can use some or all of the components depending on your current needs. You can also configure your pipelines to use other artifact repositories and security systems, and layer them over application platforms, such as Red Hat OpenShift, to integrate security into your entire software development lifecycle.

15 reasons to adopt OpenShift Virtualization

Learn how you can get the most from your existing virtualization investments while taking advantage of cloud-native architectures, streamlined operations, and new development approaches.

Read the e-book7 or explore OpenShift Virtualization developer resources.

Get started today

Take the next step toward accelerating your application development with Red Hat OpenShift. Rapidly build, deploy, run, and manage applications across infrastructures, with security and at scale.

Choose the path that best suits your organization's needs.

Try it 

Explore the Developer Sandbox. Get 30 days of instant, no-cost access to your own minimal, preconfigured Red Hat OpenShift environment for development and testing, hosted and managed by Red Hat.

Begin a self-managed trial. Access the full platform with a 60-day, no-cost trial of Red Hat OpenShift.

Advance your strategy with end-to-end security 

If you’re ready to implement a comprehensive developer experience and supply chain security strategy, consider Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite. It enhances the Red Hat OpenShift developer experience and software supply chain security capabilities to speed innovation—without compromising security. 

Deepen your knowledge

Access additional resources to better understand advanced features and plan for future innovation.

Explore Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus. This platform combines Red Hat OpenShift with key technologies—including Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management—for building, modernizing, and deploying applications at scale. 

Learn how emerging, gen AI-based approaches better equip developers with the tools they need to build applications, significantly boosting productivity. Read the e-book.8

  1. Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Native Application Platforms,” Tigran Egiazarov, Mukul Saha, Prasanna Lakshmi Narasimha, 4 August 2025.

  2.  “What is CI/CD?”Red Hat, 10 June, 2025.

  3.  “What is GitOps?” Red Hat, 27 Mar. 2025.

  4. What is a virtual machine (VM)?” Red Hat, 25 July, 2025.

  5. "What are Red Hat OpenShift Operators?" Red Hat, 28 June 2022.

  6.  "What is a Golden Path for software development?" Red Hat, 11 Mar. 2025.

  7. “15 reasons to adopt Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.” Red Hat, 8 Apr. 2025.

  8.  “Red Hat's enterprise guide to AI-assisted app dev.” Red Hat, 18 Dec. 2025.

Tags:Application development and delivery