Performance-sensitive workload? There’s an application platform for that: It’s called Kubernetes.

It’s our belief that Linux containers and container orchestration engines, most notably Kubernetes, are positioned to power the future of enterprise applications across industries. Along the way, challenges to this perception are bubbling up. In the area of performance-sensitive workloads, like portfolio risk analysis and other financial transactions where a matter of microseconds can mean the difference between success and failure, there are strong concerns. This is why Red Hat has embarked on a mission to enable Red Hat OpenShift as a performance-sensitive application platform (P-SAP) to better support these critical workloads.

Working with NVIDIA and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), we’ve been able to achieve the first steps required to reach our P-SAP goal.  With Kubernetes 1.8, from which Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is derived, running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on an HPE Apollo 6500 chassis with an HPE ProLiant XL270d Gen9 server equipped with eight of NVIDIA’s next generation NVIDIA Tesla V100 (Volta) cards, we performed the STAC-A2™ benchmark from the Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC®). STAC-A2 is the technology benchmark standard for financial market risk analysis that was specified by quants and technologists from some of the world's largest banks via the STAC Benchmark Council. Red Hat has been an active member of the Council for several years.

We’re extremely pleased to have completed this testing with our key collaborators NVIDIA and HPE, and to have performed the first benchmark of its kind to use this type of hardware configuration. Our ability to perform this benchmark testing with our collaborators is also a direct result of Red Hat’s contributions within the Kubernetes community. Our co-leadership of the Resource Management Working Group has allowed us to help drive the required hardware-enabling features to a place where they could be used to conduct this benchmark for the financial services community.

While the STAC-A2 benchmark is important, and the results can be found in the STAC Vault™, we believe this effort can have an impact beyond financial services. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, high performance computing, and big data, to name a few areas, are all examples of workloads where the set of Performance-Sensitive Application Platform features we helped co-develop with our collaborators are critical. Drawing from this experience with the Kubernetes community and STAC, we’re hoping to be able to drive OpenShift forward as the application platform for workloads on public, private and hybrid cloud, offering a common development and deployment plane for all applications, regardless of industry, type or performance sensitive nature.