Red Hat updated its OpenShift multicloud container platform with an eye toward minimizing the strain on hard-to-find IT talent.

As tech talent shortages persist, IT teams have to do more with less. A complete application platform, however, can reduce the load on already stretched-thin employees, according to Red Hat. By abstracting away the most complex everyday operations and management tasks, organizations can free up IT teams to focus on innovation.

Most notably, OpenShift 4.14 now includes hosted control planes available on bare metal and Red Hat's OpenShift virtualization platform. This part of the update is based on the Hypershift project and is targeted at reducing management costs and augmenting security.

“Platform engineering teams can now easily offer a cluster self-service for developers — with guardrails — while benefiting from the reduced operational costs of boosting control planes, provisioning time for new clusters and setting clear security boundaries between tenant clusters and the management process...all while increasing overall security,” Red Hat's Tushar Katarki, who leads project management, told a group of reporters last week.

Hosted control planes allow IT teams to run control planes using fewer nodes, which can save up to 30% on infrastructure management costs, according to the vendor. And developers can expect to save up to 60% of their time by using these centralized multicluster management capabilities.

OpenShift 4.14 also includes new support for the latest Nvidia GPU accelerators, H100 and L40S. This includes the process of developing, training and deploying compute-heavy artificial intelligence (AI) or generative AI (genAI) applications on Nvidia GPU technology, Katarki said.

With security top of mind for CIOs, Red Hat continues “to add tools and technologies that secure the end-to-end software supply chain,” Katarki said. OpenShift 4.14 includes new security and compliance tools designed to streamline security operations and support DevSecOps efforts.

To improve OpenShift's protection of sensitive data, secrets management is now available in tech preview. Secrets — like certificates, encryption keys, tokens and passwords — are stored off-cluster “in a separate, secret management system,” he said. This native system allows for all lifecycle management secrets to be protected independently to address compliance requirements with minimal overhead.

The update also includes increased visibility into cloud service consumption with Azure Managed Identities and Google Cloud User Tags, which “allows for users to consume cloud-native services directly from the cloud provider while providing security teams visibility to enforce security policies” like role-based access control, Katarki said. This adds “another layer of security for the application platform across the hybrid cloud.”