New Projects Unveiled at Red Hat Summit

It's no surprise that Red Hat used the occasion of opening day at Red Hat Summit to announce five new projects. After all, there is no better way to get buzz going about the direction you're taking than to fill a venue with people who use your products and show them your latest and greatest ideas.

We already detailed the biggest news of the day: Red Hat's deepening relationship with AWS that, among other things, is going to bring the ability to access AWS services directly from the console in Red Hat OpenShift, even when the platform is running locally instead of on AWS.

While that's the story that eclipsed the day, the other projects announced today are also certain to stir the conversation pot in the days and weeks to come. And as you might expect, they all resolve around making life easier on developers. They all also revolve around containers and OpenShift.

OpenShift.io: At a press conference this afternoon, Harry Mower, head of Red Hat's developer division, said that "we made one of the largest announcements we've made in a long time around developer tools with OpenShift.io." He went on to describe the project as "an end-to-end developer environment for building hybrid cloud services. It extends what we already have with OpenShift Online, and it is provided as a hosted service, free to developers."

According to Red Hat's website, it's "designed for development teams, whether in the same building or across the globe, to more effectively collaborate and create containerized, microservices-based solutions, deployed to hybrid cloud environments." It includes tools for team collaboration, agile planning, developer workspece management, runtime stack analysists, and continuous integration and delivery.

Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes: According to the project's webpage, this project is designed to "help developers leapfrog the barriers of traditional application development tools by providing a tightly integrated and fully supported offering for developing with multiple languages and frameworks." The idea is to get rid of the need for tedious pre-coding set-up, so that developers can get down to the brass tacks of writing apps.

"These runtimes are a collection of the key microservice runtimes that our customers are using today," Mower explained. "We want to be able to provide the runtimes and support for any type of application that you're going to want to run on OpenShift. We know that many of our customers are going to start to move towards a more containerized microservice environment, so we want to provide them the same level of support that we've had in the past for these new types of runtimes. This is a complete skew that provides support for Spring Boot, Spring, Node.js, Vert.x, MicroProfile, and of course, Java EE."

Container Health Index: According to Red Hat, this index looks into any and all of Red Hat’s container products, including those from certified partners, to determine their overall health as far as security, stability and support goes.

"This tries to cover a couple of things," explained Matt Hicks, a senior engineering executive at Red Hat. "First is a really simple grading system. so that customers can understand how well maintained the container is, just on grading it 'A' through 'F.' We also provide complete visibility [including] what are the security issues that would make us grade something not as an A? What packages do they affect? What is the impact of the security vulnerability? And then, what container could you consume that doesn't have these issues?"

Red Hat Gluster Storage with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on AWS: This is software-defined storage integrated with and optimized for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, defined by Red Hat as a "new solution to help customers achieve more consistent, software-defined storage for stateful applications."

We'll have more detailed reports on these projects in the upcoming week or so. In the meantime, it's on to day two of the Red Hat Summit.