Red Hat Openshift Container Platform 3.11 is Now Generally Available
Today, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.11 is generally available and ready for download. This solution comes with Kubernetes 1.11, as well as new features to better streamline Day 2 cluster and application operations. Thus, users gain easier central administration for clusters, environments, and users. It also provides expanded Prometheus capabilities for collecting Kubernetes-native metrics.
Earlier this year, Red Hat acquired CoreOS to make a solution like this possible. Its design focused on further delivering on their converged roadmap plans with newly incorporated features.
Key Features
Admin focused console
OpenShift Container Platform 3.11 comes with an admin focused console. Of this, OpenShift senior product marketing manager, Kathryn Hsu, states:
“When CoreOS joined Red Hat earlier this year, we knew our combined team could draw on greater expertise and leadership to further refine and expand our enterprise Kubernetes platform. OpenShift Container Platform 3.11 is designed to deliver on our converged roadmap plans with several newly-incorporated features.”
Kubernetes-native metrics
Container deployments often require scalable tools for metrics, log aggregation, and alerts. This information only proves useful if it comes in an understandable packaged. Thus, community-run projects have led to advances in this space. CNCF houses a project called Prometheus that collects time-series data as a source for alert triggers. CoreOS embraced this widely used tool. So, Prometheus comes generally available with OpenShift Container Platform 3.11. This gives engineers the ability to run their own monitoring services for applications.
Grafana dashboards
Grafana provides visibility into microservice and container native infrastructure. It helps teams analyze their data in simple language. Users can review detailed data about metrics and alerts without complex query language.
Kubernetes Operators
The information below was taken directly from the Red Hat blog post on this release, which you can read here.
The following Operators are available in OpenShift Container Platform 3.11 as Developer Preview, with optional install:
Couchbase Autonomous Operator
Couchbase offers a multi-modal distributed NoSQL database that offers in-memory performance combined with the flexibility and persistence of a JSON document store. This operator takes advantage of Couchbase’s service isolation for multi-dimensional scaling (out or up) that is well suited for cloud-native and container-based apps. Generally available since September and in Dev Preview in Red Hat OpenShift 3.11 for our Operators Lifecycle Manager, Couchbase Autonomous Operator enables automated configuration, creation, scaling, and recovery of Couchbase clusters while providing native integration of Couchbase Server with Red Hat OpenShift.
Dynatrace OneAgent Operator
Dynatrace’s full stack monitoring provides deep code-level visibility into container-based applications automatically. With auto-discovery, Dynatrace traces transactions across cloud-native environments, mapping inter-dependencies at the application, process, service, and host layer. AI-powered problem identification and root cause analytics can provide real-time answers to problems wherever they occur, including the container and node level. The Dynatrace Operator can take care of installing and updating the OneAgent pod in OpenShift, helping to remove manual efforts.
etcd Operator
etcd is a distributed key-value store that is designed to provide a reliable way to store data across a cluster of machines. This Operator, built by Red Hat, enables users to configure and manage the complexities of etcd using a declarative configuration that creates, configures, and manages etcd clusters.
MongoDB Operator
MongoDB offers a distributed, transactional database that stores data in flexible, JSON-like documents. The Operator supports deploying both production-ready replica sets and sharded clusters, and standalone dev/test instances. It works in conjunction with MongoDB Ops Manager, enabling all clusters to deploy according to operational best practices.
Prometheus Operator
Prometheus is a cloud-native monitoring system co-hosted with Kubernetes within the CNCF. This Operator, built by Red Hat, works with containerized applications and includes application domain knowledge designed to take care of common tasks like create/destroy, simple configuration, automatic generating of monitoring target configurations via labels, and more.
Red Hat AMQ Streams Operator
Red Hat AMQ Streams provides a massively scalable, distributed, and high-performance data streaming platform based on the Apache Kafka project. It offers a distributed backbone designed to allow microservices and other applications to share data with higher throughput and lower latency.