Red Hat OpenShift 4.6 Is Now Available

Today, I am pleased to announce the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift 4.6. 

Based on Kubernetes 1.19, OpenShift 4.6 brings exciting new features to our customers across our foundation of install options for infrastructure, core platform, and workload pillars. This release makes OpenShift the most up to date and complete solution for building an open hybrid cloud anywhere you’ve got CPU time: in the cloud, on-prem or at the edge.

In 4.6, the full stack automation installation of OpenShift on bare metal is generally available. Now you can run OpenShift on just about any hosting platform you can find. All you really need are computers; no need for cloud provisioning, virtual machine hosting, or any other intermediary technology. You can now use OpenShift as the absolute bottom of your stack.

A new Bare Metal Operator effectively prepares and exposes the physical nodes to the OpenShift installer to manage functions such as bootstrapping a node into Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS, and the installation of OpenShift to deploy a functioning cluster that is ready for your workloads. This new bare metal functionality uses the Metal3 project to manage bare-metal-host power management and automation through standard management interfaces such as IPMI and Redfish. It also provisions the nodes with either standard DHCP/PXE or their virtual media interfaces. 

Other infrastructure additions include support for the AWS and Azure Government Clouds. OpenShift 4.6 integrates seamlessly with the unique offerings and features these clouds provide. 

DevSecOps is more than a talking point for Red Hat. We show how to bring it to life through the new OpenShift Compliance Operator, a declarative way to specify and achieve security compliance for the OpenShift cluster. Practitioners can describe intent with a declarative configuration and profile and have the operator run a scan for the profile against the nodes in the cluster then present them to accreditors or auditors for their review and remediation (manually or automatically). We start with a set of system security checks for RHEL CoreOS that will grow over time. 

Open Virtual Network (OVN), first introduced as a tech preview in OpenShift 4.3, is now generally available. This modern, maintainable, community-based, open source Kubernetes CNI network plugin for OpenShift complements existing capabilities of OVS (and other partner SDNs), adding native support for virtual network abstractions. We have a robust roadmap planned for OVN and expect to do all new feature development in OVN-Kubernetes. 

The other capability cloud-native developers follow closely is the development of service mesh. OpenShift Service Mesh 2.0 is the next major milestone and is based on Istio 1.6. The control plane has been completely re-architected to reduce complexity and increase reliability. In addition, there are significant improvements to how keys and certificates are distributed and rotated among proxies using Envoy’s Secret Discovery Service. 

You can  increase Java application mobility and enable containerization in a new release of the Migration Toolkit for Applications 5.0. It included 147 new rules to help bring the Apache Camel integration patterns built for version 2 to version 3. This will facilitate using them in new Apache Camel related eventing capabilities included in serverless.

One of the most desired and asked for extensions for the Red Hat OpenShift Monitoring experience is the ability to leverage our monitoring tools and infrastructure to monitor workloads (applications) running in user-defined namespaces. Previously available as technology preview, this feature is now generally available. We have extended our stack with multiple new components and views inside the Console to provide a multitenant interface that can scrape new application/workload targets and add new alerting rules. OpenShift is now taking the burden off users who previously had to implement their own stack for the full monitoring experience.

The new log forwarding API gives the ability to forward logs by input source (types and/or namespaces) to Kafka and external Elasticsearch in a secure way. 

For customers who wish to standardize on a specific version for longer, the platform now offers Extended Update Support which allows for more choice when it comes to lifecycle management.

There are many more improvements in Red Hat OpenShift 4.6, and the full release notes, including details on all the new technologies in tech preview and on deprecations, can be found here. My fellow product managers delivered an amazing presentation with details of what you see here and more. And if you have time to sit through all of these changes explained in person, you can check out this deep dive into the changes in 4.6, which we originally recorded on OpenShift.tv. 

One final note: In the Forrester Wave for Multicloud Container Development Platforms, Forrester evaluated the top eight on-premises software vendors and cloud providers in this rapidly evolving space and named Red Hat (with IBM) as a leader, and the innovation and execution you see through OpenShift releases is a big contributor to that. So congratulations and thanks!

If you want to try out Red Hat OpenShift 4.6, there are several ways to do it;  online learning tutorials, to demos on your laptop, to how-to’s for the public cloud or your own data center.

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