Today's announcement of Red Hat OpenShift.io was followed by a full day of developer toolset Summit sessions. These were presented by the OpenShift.io product development team and covered some truly amazing OpenShift.io features. While there are too many features to cover in a single blog post, these were my top 7 items.
1. A Kanban board that is actually useful
OpenShift.io is built from the ground up for development teams to rapidly release software. This is one of the primary goals of the platform. One of my favorite things is the included Kanban board. While web-based boards are nothing new, this one is actually integrated with the rest of the development environment. Git commits, issues, etc. can all be managed from within OpenShift.io and without having to copy/paste data between 20 different web tools.
2. Jenkins on steroids
Most IT shops are using Jenkins for some build pipeline. Anyone who has set one up can tell you it is a real pain to tie Jenkins in with your build system, let alone some type of CI/CD hackery. With OpenShift.io, you get this for free, complete with native integration and customizable build pipelines. The idea is to remove all the complexity with building this for yourself and facilitate rapid testing and environment promotion. Jenkins workflows can be viewed directly in Jenkins or as part of the OpenShift.io dashboard. Finally, developers have access to a build pipeline template Jenkinsfile with a large library to include whatever pipeline components you might need. This is highly customizable and can even be tried with specific git branches.
3. Eclipse without the laptop
OpenShift.io includes the Eclipse Che IDE. This is not an add-on, this is not something you have to install on your laptop, rather it exists within the OpenShift.io platform. Eclipse Che is the next-generation Eclipse IDE, bringing the full IDE to a browser with native container support. Your code seamlessly builds and executes within OpenShift.io containers, routes are automatically created and you can even pull up a terminal. This brings this shared usability of Google Docs to an IDE, where you can easily pass URLs around to your IDE session, even restoring the cursor location between users. OpenShift.io doesn't just give your dev environments matching production, you actually write code within the platform itself!
4. Make Software Great Again
OpenShift.io gives you all the tools and makes it ridiculously easy to migrate legacy J2EE applications to the cloud. In fact, OpenShift.io even gives you a migration wizard that will do an enormous amount of migration work for you, down to making code-level changes. This feature was demoed in this morning's keynote with the automatic migration from WebSphere to JBoss EAP7 running in OpenShift.io.
5. Securing the Java Ecosystem
The general health of the Java ecosystem has been called into question following many severe exploits over the last few years. OpenShift.io has full-stack analysis capabilities, which allow you to inspect every component of your stack. A powerful engine scans community provided libraries and will alert you should there be a security problem. Moreover, it will recommend safer library versions or even recommend alternative libraries. This goes beyond simple alerts and suggestions to really help you safely develop secure solutions. This integration also extends to within the Eclipse Che IDE, throwing an alert when using insecure software.
6. Analytics Engine
The OpenShift.io analytics engine powers the security scanning service as previously mentioned. This integrated big data analytics platform, based on Fabric8, is a self-learning platform, which aims to improve code quality and assist the developer in making data-based choices. It scans community libraries, CVEs, commits authors, community sizes, and other metrics, feeding this into a known probability model. The end result is truly useful, real-time development assistance, which will continue to grow and improve over time.
7. Application Generator
You can quick-start an application by using a simple wizard. Using the quick-start gets you a basic application, complete with:
- Build pipeline integrated with Jenkins
- New repo on Github (populated with a basic structure)
- New project created in OpenShift
This makes it very easy to get started and takes care of the annoying parts, including a build groovy script.
All combined, OpenShift.io builds on OpenShift 3 to provide a truly amazing platform for developers.
Head over to openshift.io to start trying these and many more features today!
Last updated: October 31, 2023
