Line-of-business managers aren’t notoriously sympathetic to application developers when they’re waiting for new application services to support their operations. That’s why those developers are always looking for ways to automate as much as possible of the mundane, detail-intensive provisioning and systems management they have to do – work that takes them away from the core value-add of delivering application services on time and on spec.
Rec Hat is hoping that the latest version of its on-premise Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) package OpenShift will take away some of the pain. The company has just announced the general availability of OpenShift Enterprise 2.1.
Enhancements in the new version are intended to improve application delivery for enterprise customers and enable them to foster a solid “DevOps” culture, where development and operations collaborate more closely and effectively, the company says.
New features include consolidated log and metrics management, new versions of application programming languages, increased application availability linked to a new zone/region model, and a new plug-in interface that allows operations to improve the integration of existing policy orchestration into the PaaS platform.
2.1 also promotes new ways to integrate and work with large numbers of groups within corporate organizations, Red Hat says. New intelligence has been built into the platform, specifically to support the automatic remedy of common application service issues.
“OpenShift’s scalable and open source architecture enables faster developments with decreased delivery time for enterprise business applications that are fully integrated into data centre best practices,” the company says.
Features in the new version – or soon to come in an x.x.x release – include updated MySQL 5.5, Python 3.3, PHP 5.4 and MongoDB 2.4 cartridges with OpenShift Enterprise entitlement that allows OpenShift to offer security and bug fixes including technical support for both the platform and the content it provides.
New gathering and consolidation methods for platform and application logs have been added, as well as a new way to gather and store key performance attributes from the operating system and application services. Red Hat says that applications provided by OpenShift can now intelligently span infrastructure across zones within regions, which it says increases the resiliency of the services provided by the PaaS offering.
The new plug-in interface means OpenShift can now integrate with the complex decision automation policies a large data centre might need to follow thanks to regulatory, ITIL or change management facilities. Other features include:
- Introduction of teams as an interface for LDAP group integration with OpenShift user management features
- The release of the watchman daemon that supports the automation of common remedies so administrators can scale to the PaaS platform more efficiently
“These additions to the OpenShift Enterprise platform provide organizations with an enterprise application platform, supporting the Red Hat JBoss Middleware solutions, all presented in an automated fashion backed with the natural elasticity of PaaS,” Red Hat said in the announcement release.
“Red Hat is applying its unique combination of skills and expertise in open source, enterprise middleware, and cloud architectures to deliver key technologies to its users through an open hybrid cloud portfolio of products.”
OpenShift Enteprise 2.1 is currently available for download by customers in North America.