The latest updates to Red Hat Runtimes

Today, we are happy to announce that the latest release of Red Hat Runtimes is now available. This release includes updates that build upon the work the team has done over the past year for building modern, cloud-native applications.

Red Hat Runtimes, part of the Red Hat Application Services portfolio, is a set of products, tools and components for developing and maintaining cloud-native applications. It offers lightweight runtimes and frameworks for highly-distributed cloud architectures, such as microservices or serverless applications. We continuously make updates and improvements to meet the changing needs of our customers, and to help developers better build business-critical applications. Read on for the latest.

Quarkus

Quarkus is a Kubernetes-native Java stack that provides a container-first approach to building Java applications. Following our announcement of Quarkus becoming a fully supported framework in Red Hat Runtimes, we plan to continue to provide updates to it, including adding full support for building native Quarkus applications later this year and incorporating it into OpenShift Serverless. We will also support additional features as they land in the upstream project.

Read the release notes to learn more about the Red Hat build of Quarkus.

Red Hat Data Grid

Red Hat Data Grid is a distributed in-memory key-value data store. It is commonly used for fast in-memory caching of data, support for analytics workloads, distributed streams, and more.

Red Hat Data Grid 8, part of Red Hat Runtimes, introduces a new server architecture that uses significantly less system resources for basic server functions and provides a better base for future development. It also improves the operational user experience for administrators through a new, streamlined administrative console and a Kubernetes Operator for Red Hat OpenShift. And for developers, we have improved REST application programming interfaces (APIs) and introduced a new command line interface - both of which should make working with Red Hat Data Grid even easier.

To learn more about Red Hat Data Grid 8, read the Red Hat Data Grid 8.0 Release Notes.

Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) expansion pack

JBoss EAP, also part of Red Hat Runtimes, is built to provide simplified deployment and full Jakarta EE performance for applications in any environment, whether on-premises or in the cloud, to enable developers to meet business demands.

The latest release of Red Hat Runtimes includes a JBoss EAP expansion pack, which provides an implementation of the Eclipse MicroProfile specification for JBoss EAP application workloads. By applying this expansion pack to existing EAP deployments, customers can use MicroProfile APIs to build Java microservices. The expansion pack is designed to provide its own support policies and lifecycle definitions closer to the release cadence of the Eclipse MicroProfile specifications. This means that JBoss EAP instances - with the expansion pack installed - will be covered in their entirety by the new expansion pack lifecycle, maintaining access to support or functions.

For more detail, check out this blog on what’s new in the JBoss EAP expansion pack for MicroProfile.

Red Hat Runtimes support for IBM Z-Series

With this update, we are working to enable most Red Hat  Runtimes components to run on IBM Z systems to support IBM Cloud Paks for Applications, which are built on OpenShift. 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 Z-series
• Container distributions on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for IBM Z 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 and AMQ Broker
• Testing of the cloud-native runtimes (Quarkus, Spring Boot, Node.js, Vert.x and Thorntail) for RHEL for IBM Z systems and OpenJ9

This update brings the option of Red Hat Runtimes to an even wider base of customers, and enables IBM Z-Series customers to take advantage of their investments with additional choices for runtimes.

Updates to Red Hat Single Sign-On

Red Hat Single Sign-On enables developers to easily integrate web single sign-on capabilities - based on industry standards for enterprise security - into their applications. We have further expanded this with updates that include a technology preview of the Red Hat implementation of the Web Authentication specification, which uses public key encryption and strong authenticators, including device biometrics and fobs, among other things, to create a more secure and user-friendly authentication experience that does not rely on shared passwords.

For more details on these and other features, read the Red Hat Single Sign-On release notes.

Additional updates

We are also happy to note that the latest version of Red Hat Runtimes brings our support of Spring Boot up to the latest version, Spring Boot 2.2. This release includes the supported Reactive Spring WebFlux with Vert.x underneath.

Additionally, Open Liberty, another recent addition to our runtime portfolio, will move forward with its cadence of monthly supported updates. Support for MicroProfile 3.3 highlights the additions to OpenLiberty for this quarter.

These updates help give our customers the best options for their business-critical application development. Continuous updates help customers to avoid disruption and stay current, and the abundance of choice gives developers peace of mind knowing they can choose the right tool for the task. These features and more are available in Red Hat Runtimes, and are available to customers via the Red Hat Customer Portal.