Red Hat updates Runtimes offering, announces general availability of JBoss EAP in Microsoft Azure App Service

We recently announced the availability of Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) as a native offering in Microsoft Azure via the Azure Marketplace. At the same time, we noted that work was underway to make JBoss EAP available in Azure App Service as a fully supported runtime managed by Microsoft.

We’re pleased to share that those efforts have quickly come to fruition and JBoss EAP is now generally available in Azure App Service. The news also coincides with the community release of Quarkus 2.0, as well as the latest release of Red Hat Runtimes – which includes updates to JBoss EAP, Red Hat Single Sign-On, Red Hat Data Grid, and the Red Hat build of Eclipse Vert.x.

Each of these developments represent a milestone for Red Hat and for our customers. We recognize that the market is changing and customer needs are evolving, and we are continually adapting our portfolio to not only meet customers where they are today but also give them a path to get where they want to be tomorrow.

Bringing JBoss EAP and Azure together is an important step in enabling customers to extend their investments in Java as the world increasingly leans into the cloud as a way of increasing efficiency, scale and innovation. We are also seeing customers move toward a managed cloud services approach, which offers the same core application capabilities without having to take on the task of managing and maintaining the technologies themselves. For Java users that are ready to make this shift, JBoss EAP on Azure offers a compelling way forward.

Red Hat Runtimes

Making JBoss EAP available in public cloud environments like Microsoft Azure helps to extend the ongoing work around our core runtimes offerings, which are designed to offer broad capabilities in a flexible package, suitable for modern application environments.

Red Hat Runtimes is a curated set of products, tools and components for developing and maintaining cloud-native applications. It offers lightweight runtimes and frameworks for highly-distributed cloud environments such as microservices, with in-memory caching for fast data access, and messaging for quick data transfer supporting existing applications.

The latest release of Red Hat Runtimes includes several notable updates:

• JBoss EAP 7.4 – Compatible with Jakarta EE 8, JBoss EAP 7.4 includes a wide range of new security, server management, and data access features. The latest release includes support for TLS 1.3, Git-based server configuration management, and an easier way to distribute shared libraries across a cluster. JBoss EAP 7.4 also exposes new metrics for managed executor services, making it easier to observe performance of multi-threaded applications. JBoss EAP 7.4 continues to be fully supported on Red Hat OpenShift, and in this new release you can now declare custom Galleon feature packs to be used when building custom JBoss EAP container images using S2I.
• JBoss EAP XP 3.0 - With the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform expansion pack (EAP XP), developers can use Eclipse MicroProfile APIs to build and deploy microservices-based applications. This new release brings support for the MicroProfile 4.0 specification, including bulk configuration property support, the ability to define cross-invocation life cycles for circuit breakers and bulkheads, and support for adding tags to individual metrics which enhances the observability of EAP XP applications. JBoss EAP XP 3.0 will be generally available shortly.
• Red Hat Single Sign-On 7.4 – Based on the open source Keycloak project, Red Hat Single Sign-On (SSO) provides web SSO capabilities based on popular standards such as OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, and SAML 2.0. The latest release adds a technical preview of W3C Web Authentication (WebAuthn) and a host of improvements for two-factor, passwordless, and identity-first authentication methods. This release also adds a vault for storing and retrieving secrets, providing more secure, automated access to secrets—which can be read from Red Hat OpenShift, an Elytron credential store, or a custom vault—to eliminate the storage of clear text values. A preview of the new account console is also included in this release.
• Red Hat Data Grid 8.2 – The latest version of Red Hat's high performance in-memory data store brings a significantly improved query implementation that is now based on Hibernates Search 6, leading to faster indexing, a technical preview of the new Red Hat Data Grid CLI, statistics for queries, and strong-typed indexing configuration that replaces string key/value properties. Red Hat Data Grid 8.2 also features improved security capabilities, such as credential keystores, role-based access control (RBAC) for Red Hat Data Grid installations and caches, audit logs to track changes to the Red Hat Data Grid clusters, and endpoint IP filtering. The Red Hat Data Grid Operator for OpenShift includes powerful new capabilities for deploying cross-site replication clusters, batch creation of Red Hat Data Grid elements, and an easier way to back up and restore the state of the grid in disaster recovery scenarios.
• Red Hat build of Eclipse Vert.x 4.1 – Eclipse Vert.x 4.1 features several updates that have been brought into the Red Hat build of Vert.x, including the addition of reactive Microsoft SQL Server Client as a target database, a new Vert.x HTTP proxy component, support for RxJava 3 and Open Telemetry tracing, and the ability to write service proxies with futures.

These features are now available for customers and can be found in the Red Hat Customer Portal.

Quarkus 2.0

As we look ahead to where the market is going, one of the things that excites us most is plans for growth and evolution of the open source Quarkus project. Quarkus was born out of the need for a small footprint, lightweight, high performing, Kubernetes-friendly framework for Java-based applications. Today, it is used by organizations in a variety of industries to improve developer productivity, operational efficiency and cost savings. The community recently celebrated the release of Quarkus 2.0, which adds enhancements across the board, with new and exciting features like continuous testing, Dev Services, a new developer UI and developer CLI, along with a number of other capabilities that work to further improve developer and operational productivity. Red Hat customers should expect to see these features available soon in Red Hat Runtimes as part of the Red Hat build of Quarkus.