What’s new in Red Hat Runtimes?

We are excited to announce that the latest release of Red Hat Runtimes is now available. The team has been hard at work on new updates and capabilities for building enterprise-grade, cloud-native applications.

Red Hat Runtimes, part of the Red Hat Middleware 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. Read on to learn more about the new updates and features that are currently available in Red Hat Runtimes.

New security features

Security must be a continuous activity, and one that is considered at all layers of the stack and at every stage of the application and infrastructure life cycle. From the initial application design, through the building, deploying and managing applications, integrating security can reduce risk and increase trust. Red Hat Runtimes addresses security in a few ways, including:

Red Hat Single Sign-on (SSO): Based on the upstream Keycloak project, Red Hat SSO enables developers to provide web single sign-on capabilities based on industry standards for enterprise security, and extend that security across their application landscape. It’s continuously delivered as part of Red Hat SSO Continuous Delivery and the new features include adapters for Apache Tomcat 9 and Red Hat JBoss Web Server. This enables applications to more easily integrate with Red Hat SSO and provide enhanced security without a lot of work on the part of developers.

Also in the security realm, to reduce risk and increase compliance of Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP), one of the supported runtime deployments, Red Hat recently earned the Common Criteria Certification at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+ award for JBoss EAP 7.2. The certification provides government agencies, financial institutions, and customers in other security-sensitive and regulated environments the assurance and confidence that JBoss EAP 7.2 meets government security standards.

Open Liberty

Part of the value for customers of Red Hat Runtimes lies in its freedom of choice. By recommending a set of curated and popular runtimes for cloud-native applications, Red Hat helps customers to choose the “right tool for the right job,” matching application requirements to each runtime’s strengths. We committed to providing what we believe to be the best choices for our customers, and are constantly adding to our runtimes portfolio, to include the most up-to-date and relevant tools. One of the latest additions to our runtimes portfolio is Open Liberty, which was originally created by the IBM WebSphere team and is now fully supported by Red Hat. Adding Open Liberty to Red Hat Runtimes gives customers additional capabilities to create new or migrate existing apps to a modern, cloud-native runtime. This is especially relevant for IBM customers looking to modernize with IBM and Red Hat.

Node.js updates

For the past two years, Red Hat has provided a supported Node.js runtime on Red Hat OpenShift as part of Red Hat Runtimes. Node.js is an asynchronous, event-driven JavaScript runtime which is designed to build scalable network applications. Our goal has been to provide rapid releases of the upstream Node.js core project, including example applications to help developers get up and running quickly, container images of Node.js, integrations with other components of Red Hat's cloud-native stack, and, of course, provide world-class service and support for customers.

We’ve now unified the support and distribution of Node.js in Red Hat Runtimes, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Red Hat OpenShift. We’ve moved to a single distribution of Node.js based on Red Hat Software Collections, updated every six weeks (with a two year support lifecycle for each major Node.js release), and two support models to choose from (one through a Red Hat Enterprise Linux or OpenShift subscription, and one through Red Hat Runtimes). This gives customers flexibility in choosing the most appropriate support model depending on their unique Node.js needs.

Kubernetes Operators for Red Hat Runtimes

Red Hat has nearly two decades worth of experience working with customers, and in that time, we have gained a lot of knowledge. This operational knowledge is then put into operators and encodes that into a Kubernetes application capable of packaging, deploying and managing applications on both Kubernetes and OpenShift. Red Hat Runtimes includes several capabilities that can be deployed to OpenShift and providing Kubernetes Operators for them makes it easy to deploy and manage them. Recently we’ve added the following Operators for Red Hat Runtimes:

• Red Hat Data Grid Operator - Provides operational intelligence to simplify deploying Red Hat Data Grid on Red Hat OpenShift
• Red Hat AMQ Broker Operator - Deploy and manage Red Hat AMQ on Red Hat OpenShift. Includes several pre-configured examples and supports custom broker configuration for persistence, clustering, security and more.

Upstream, the following operators are available:

• Keycloak (upstream for Red Hat SSO) - Deploy and manage Keycloak instances on Kubernetes and OpenShift including more seamless upgrades and metrics.
• Open Liberty - Deploy and manage applications running on Open Liberty into OpenShift clusters, and perform Day-2 operations such as gathering traces and dumps using the operator.
• WildFly (upstream for JBoss EAP) - Handles provisioning, installation and configuration of WildFly and the applications deployed to it.

A new upstream operator in the runtimes space is Halkyon - it’s an operator targeted at developers, and aims to tackle the complexity of deploying a multiple-microservice application with different runtimes to Kubernetes. It enables developers to express application architecture in a more abstract yet native Kubernetes way, and manage relationships between different components of their applications. It’s early days, but having a solid developer experience on OpenShift is a core tenant of the work of many groups, including Red Hat Runtimes and you can expect even more as Halkyon evolves.

These features and more are available in Red Hat Runtimes, and customers can get the latest updates in the Red Hat Customer Portal.