What's new in Red Hat OpenShift 4.13

Red Hat OpenShift is a Kubernetes-based app-dev platform that enables developers to build, deploy, and manage containerized applications. It provides a comprehensive set of tools and services for developers, operations teams, and IT organizations to streamline application development and delivery.

Red Hat OpenShift version 4.13, the latest release, introduces several new features and enhancements that help organizations accelerate their digital transformation journey. Let's take a closer look at some of the key features of OpenShift 4.13.

Improved developer experience

OpenShift 4.13 introduces several new features that improve the developer experience and make it easier to build and deploy applications, including creating serverless functions from the developer perspective, using Red Hat OpenShift Serverless. Check out OpenShift 4.13: Create serverless functions and more to see all of the new features and enhancements for the developer experience.

Enhanced security

Security is a critical aspect of any enterprise-grade platform, and Red Hat OpenShift 4.13 introduces several new security features to help organizations secure their applications and infrastructure. These include:

• Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes 4.0 is now available as a cloud service. With the ability to see your entire Kubernetes environment and its state of cybersecurity readiness, identify high-priority security risks of your deployments, and detect and respond to irregular activity that could indicate an attack, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security speeds up developer productivity by embedding security guides in the developer workflows and the software supply chain. To access the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service, you can request a demo or access it from Amazon Marketplace. This service extends beyond Red Hat OpenShift and includes Kubernetes services from all major cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
• A cert-manager operator lets users integrate external certificate authorities and provides provisioning, removal, and retirement of certificates.

Improved scalability and performance

OpenShift 4.13 introduces several new features that improve the scalability and performance of the platform. These include:

• Hosted Control Planes on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (Preview) is an OpenShift topology that adds a separation of concerns between workload management and platform management to allow hybrid cloud operations at scale. Faster provisioning time and optimized multi-cluster deployments at scale are now possible with hosted control planes.
• Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.8 adds PolicySet for Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus to manage Kubernetes resources across multiple clusters and regional stateful application replication with Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation 4.13.
• Automatically scale applications with the Custom Metrics Autoscaler operator, which is generally available in Red Hat OpenShift 4.13. This autoscaler enables developers to horizontally scale the number of pods for their application workloads based on resource utilization metrics (CPU and memory usage), events, and custom metrics.

More flexibility

Red Hat OpenShift 4.13 introduces several new features that improve the flexibility to support a wide range of infrastructure footprints across the hybrid cloud, from the edge to on-premise to the hybrid cloud. These include:

• 3-node clusters on Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and VMware vSphere for developers and administrators to use for development, testing, and production for resource-constrained environments.
• Single-node Red Hat OpenShift on x86-based instances in AWS and ARM-based bare metal delivers inexpensive clusters for development and testing applications before deploying them to edge or remote locations.

Get started with Red Hat OpenShift 4.13

To get started with Red Hat OpenShift 4.13, try the Developer Sandbox for Red Hat OpenShift. It provides free access to a shared OpenShift cluster for your development needs without requiring you to set up and configure an OpenShift cluster. Once you sign up, learn more about OpenShift and Kubernetes through hands-on interactive learning content.

You can also explore OpenShift Platform capabilities and try it for the cloud footprint of your choice.