Red Hat released the latest iteration of its OpenShift Container Platform sporting tighter integration of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its own OpenShift Ansible Broker for provisioning and managing services.

OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 users will now have direct access to a handful of AWS services. These services can be configured and deployed from within OpenShift.

The integration includes the ability to build and extend container-based enterprise applications with OpenShift using AWS compute, database, analytics, machine learning, networking, and mobile application services. Some of those services include Amazon Simple Queue (SQS), Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3), and Amazon Redshift.

Brian Gracely, director of product strategy for OpenShift at Red Hat, said the integration provides customers with a unified view of their own applications and public cloud capabilities.

“This brings those things together for a more consistent work flow,” Gracely said. “It’s now just one click to an AWS service, which makes it much simpler to manage those services.”

Red Hat in May initially announced plans to increase OpenShift integration with AWS. The 3.7 release is the general availability of that announcement.

Gracely said the other big component of the latest release is expanded integration of Ansible playbooks for service bundles. Ansible is Red Hat’s open source automation platform, with playbooks housing templates for certain functions.

The update moves access to those playbooks into an application programming interface (API).

“For the hundreds of thousands of Ansible playbooks out there, they are now at the other end of an API,” Gracely said. “With just one click they can be associated with workflow and management of the platform.”

The latest OpenShift release also includes a service catalog, which allows organizations to connect their OpenShift applications to other services. Gracely said this allows developers to focus more on service and application creation instead of how to migrate those applications across their organization.

Gracely noted Red Hat expects to move early next year on releasing tighter integration with Microsoft Azure. Red Hat in August announced plans for native support for Windows Server containers for use on OpenShift. Specific support will be included on OpenShift, OpenShift Dedicated on Microsoft Azure, and SQL Server database management system.

The latest OpenShift Container Platform release also comes on the heels of yet another Kubernetes update. The container orchestration’s community recently unveiled Kubernetes 1.8, keeping up with its task or releasing a new version every quarter.

Gracely said the rapid release cycle has been impressive, but noted Red Hat has made a conscious decision to be about one release cycle behind in terms of support within its OpenShift platform. He explained this has allowed Red Hat to work out any potential bugs in the latest Kubernetes releases and provide customers with a bit of breathing room.

Gracely said that on average Red Hat fixes 100 bugs between the trunk release and what the company releases as part of OpenShift. Red Hat in turn pushes those updates back into the Kubernetes community.

“We typically look to communicate with our customers and let them know what’s coming and that we might need to conduct further testing,” Gracely said. “It’s a challenge in that it’s coming so rapidly, but we are pretty experienced in dealing with that.”