OpenShift goes NoOps with 4.0 preview

OpenShift goes NoOps with 4.0 preview


A developer preview for version 4.0 of Red Hat’s container application platform OpenShift is now available with the goals of making Kubernetes use effortless and lightening the operational burden in general.

Principles of site reliability engineering and serverless form the basis of the upcoming version and should amongst other things “blend deployment and development without limiting the developer” as well as “automate and standardize infrastructure in service of the application”.

The list of distinguishing features in a current blog entry gives interested parties a rough idea about what this is going to mean, stating that monitoring and debugging components should be easy with the new release, with failure and recovery being an expected (and therefore taken care of) part of every system aspect. Configuration is supposed to be done via APIs now, with machines and operating systems serving self-describing clusters.

OpenShift 4.0’s ultimate goal is summed up as providing “a NoOps platform for operations”, which equals a higher level of abstraction for things like virtual machines and load balancers, running containers instead of installing agents and leveraging the platform’s monitoring options instead of writing a stack to do so.

An integral part of all this (there’s still some Docker involved, don’t worry) is Google-built container orchestrator Kubernetes – hence the description “enterprise Kubernetes for Developers” on OpenShift Origin’s GitHub site. Though the team strongly believes in Kubernetes as a tool for better software in general, operating it tends to get tricky.

Which is why the next OpenShift is meant to facilitate its use even further by automating Kubernetes deployments as much as sensible, helping operations by delivering safe upgrades, and as mentioned, hiding some of the complexibility.

Anyone interested in trying can access the developer preview via try.openshift.com, but a Red Hat account and, apparently, AWS credentials are needed to get started. We’ll keep you updated as new details pop-up and we’ve had our first testing session.