Red Hat launched significant, whole-number updates to both its Kubernetes-based OpenShift platform and its core Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platform. Those extensive updates come as the company awaits the closing of its $34 billion acquisition by IBM that is set to close during the second half of the year.

The most extensive updates were laid on OpenShift, which is Red Hat’s open source container platform that uses Kubernetes to support the deployment of containers in a multi-cloud environment. It acts as a management layer for container deployments.

OpenShift 4 now includes Red Hat’s Certified Operators, which it inherited as part of the Operator Framework when it acquired CoreOS last year for $250 million. That framework is basically a controller that runs Kubernetes for a particular application. It does this by using the Kubernetes API to handle the creation and management of application instances. Within OpenShift, Operators allow for on-demand provisioning of application services and provide build-and-deploy automation for containerized applications.

Other Operator-enabled features include an application environment with Red Hat Middleware that allows enterprises to unify their development work around Operator capabilities, and an in-development Operator-enabled storage platform that will support persistent storage for cloud-native applications in a hybrid-cloud environment.

The CoreOS connection also brings a commercial version of the RHEL CoreOS platform, which is a lightweight, container-optimized Linux operating system distribution. That platform will sit alongside RHEL and provide users with a choice of operating systems.

The update also includes Red Hat’s CodeReady Workspaces that allow developers to bridge the gap between containers, Kubernetes, and their own familiar work environments; and the OpenShift Service Mesh that combines Istio, Jaeger, and Kiali projects as a single product.

Microsoft Azure this week was announced as the first public cloud supported by the latest OpenShift release. Red Hat plans to expand that support to other vendors like Alibaba, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud. It will also roll out support for private cloud platforms like OpenStack, virtualization platforms, and bare metal servers.

IBM had OpenShift as a central talking point behind its purchase of Red Hat. Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of IBM’s Hybrid Cloud, referenced a pre-acquisition deal to integrate IBM’s Cloud Private platform and middleware services with Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform. The combo allows customers to build and deploy containerized applications on a single, integrated container platform with a single view into enterprise data.

During one of Red Hat’s last quarterly results conference calls prior to the IBM deal being announced, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst told investors that OpenShift was a significant part of recent customer discussions. “It’s hard to find a customer that’s not looking at or starting to use OpenShift in some way, which is great to see,” he said.

OpenShift 4 also has deeper serverless integration. This includes support for the Kubernetes-based Knative platform and the recently announced Kubernetes-based event-driven autoscaling (KEDA) platform developed with Microsoft. Both are available as a developer preview in OpenShift 4.

Red Hat was one of the founding developers of the Knative platform that launched last year. It’s an open source set of components that allows for the building and deployment of container-based serverless applications that can be transported between cloud providers. Basically Knative is using the market momentum behind Kubernetes to provide an established platform on which to support serverless deployments that can run across different public clouds.

KEDA was launched earlier this week as an open source project that brings more dynamic autoscaling functionality to a containerized environment. It can be used in any Kubernetes environment, on-premise, or in any cloud.

RHEL's updates were mostly focused on increasing functionality and usability of the platform. This included default integration of Red Hat's Insights intelligence product that is packaged in an as-a-service model. Insights uses predictive analytics to proactively identify and remediate IT issues including security vulnerabilities and stability problems.

It also includes Red Hat's Smart Management layer that allows enterprises a simplified management layer for RHEL deployments across hybrid cloud deployments.

While OpenShift is seen as key to Red Hat’s – and now IBM’s – future, analysts noted that IBM also wanted to get its hands on RHEL. According to an IDC report, RHEL trailed only Microsoft in terms of worldwide server operating environment market share in that space at the end of 2017. However, RHEL has seen a significant slowdown in terms of overall growth, though Red Hat’s management downplayed that dip as being tied to the cyclical nature of the platform’s subscription model.