Red Hat Unveils Device Edge and OpenShift 4.14, Contributes Additional Backstage Plugins to Open Source Community

As part of the key announcements at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023, Red Hat disclosed various developments affecting its product portfolio, demonstrating its continuous commitment towards advancing open-source solutions.

Commencing the string of revelations, Red Hat declared the broad rollout of its Red Hat Device Edge. Designed as a foundation for edge devices deployment, it packs an edge-optimized operating system and a backed-up version of the lean Kubernetes venture, MicroShift. Thus, giving consumers dual deployment choices.

As per the tech firm, the Device Edge brings along it several perks like compact footprint, standardized operational experience, enhanced flexibility in workloads, and streamlined deployment strategies.

Succeeding the Device Edge announcement, the firm introduced Red Hat OpenShift 4.14. The updated variant includes the broad availability of hosted control planes, contributing significantly towards reducing managerial overheads, enhancing pandemic times of cluster provisioning, overcoming barriers due to cluster scale, and segregating control planes from workloads to ensure greater security. OpenShift 4.14 can reportedly pare infrastructure costs by 30%, additionally, it can also slash developer time by 60%.

Besides, the latest OpenShift version also supports running virtual machines and containers concurrently using Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, backing NVIDIA GPU accelerators, and making Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated available on Google Cloud Marketplace.

A significant initiative encompassed Red Hat contributing another five new plugins to the Backstage - a structure utilized for creating developer portals. The mentioned plugins correspond to Azure Container Registry, JFrog Artifactory, Kiali, Nexus, and 3scale.

Red Hat's contribution to the Backstage society doesn't come as a surprise. The firm has a history of contributing to the community, starting with joining the community in 2022, followed by donating five plugins later that year. The plugins included Application Topology for Kubernetes, Multi Cluster View with Open Cluster Management, Container Image Registry for Quay, Pipelines with Tekton, and Authentication and Authorization with Keycloak.

Senior director of Developer Tools Product Management at Red Hat, Balaji Sivasubramanian expressed the company's vision about the future of developer productivity. He articulated the belief that ongoing progress and innovation in projects like Backstage play a pivotal role. The plugin donations aim to expedite, simplify, and extend the development process while adhering to Red Hat's commitment to helping developers conform to existing demands and pacesetting for future innovations.

In a concluding announcement, Red Hat introduced Ansible Inside, a facility that enables developers to incorporate Ansible Playbooks within their applications. The product is particularly beneficial for consumers looking to incorporate automation into their applications without the need for the full capabilities of the Ansible Automation Platform.

Including the likes of AppMaster, Red Hat continues its effort to bring adaptive and responsive offerings, pushing the boundaries of open-source platforms and significantly impacting developer productivity.