Red Hat users waiting for OpenShift 4.0 can stop holding their breath – the company has gone straight to v4.1.

Red Hat took the wraps off v4.0 of its container platform at its annual summit almost a month ago, tilting its container platform towards the hybrid cloud.

However, general availability only came yesterday, with the company announcing “Built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Kubernetes, OpenShift Container Platform 4.1 provides a more secure and scalable multi-tenant operating system for your enterprise-class applications, while delivering integrated application runtimes and libraries.”

Yes, that’s right. There never was a 4.0 general release. Rather, a “release advisory” yesterday announced “Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.1, which fixes several bugs and includes various enhancements, is now available.”

The release notes add, “Because only Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 7.6 is supported for compute machines, you must not upgrade the Red Hat Enterprise Linux compute machines to version 8.”

If you’re itching to upgrade from v3.x, tough. The notes inform us that “Upgrading from 3.x to 4.1 is currently not available. You must perform a new installation of OpenShift Container Platform 4.1.”

4.1 has an ”installer-provisioned infrastructure, where the installation program controls all areas of the installation process.” This also providers “an opinionated best practices deployment of OpenShift Container Platform 4.1 for AWS instances only.”

“You can also install with a user-provided infrastructure on AWS, bare metal, or vSphere hosts,” Red Hat adds.

They also promise that “Easy, over-the-air upgrades for asynchronous z-stream releases of OpenShift Container Platform 4.x is available. Cluster administrators can upgrade using the Cluster Settings tab in the web console.”

There is a long list of deprecated features, with Hawkular and Cassandra being replaced by Cluster Monitoring, and Atomic Host and System containers being replaced by RHEL Core OS. A number of features are still in “Technology Preview” and should not be used in production. These include Local Storage Persistent Volumes, Ephemeral Storage Limit/Requests, CephFS and Podman, and Istio. The release notes also include a 25 strong list of “known issues”.

Brian Gracely, director of product strategy at Red Hat told us by email:”Most enterprise customers do not deploy a version .0 of any software, so we used that timeframe to allow additional preview time for existing customers to get acclimated to the new features and architecture.”

He added, “We expect the ongoing 4.x releases to follow the previous OpenShift schedule of upstream Kubernetes (release date) plus one quarter to enhance enterprise stability and integration.”