Red Hat this week bolstered support for its Quay automated container image registry to support multiple architectures, Windows containers, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)-based images.

Quay stores container images, which are the bits of data used to construct an application. It offers visibility into those images and can be integrated into a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflow.

The multi-architecture support allows Quay to run on IBM Power LE and Z System workloads, Arm-based IoT devices, and Windows-based workloads. The Windows container support comes on the heels of the Kubernetes community adding that exact same capability in the latest 1.14 release.

The RHEL integration support allows for the use of RHEL-based images for the Quay container. Red Hat said this brings increased reliability, security, performance, and a consistent operation model.

Red Hat also announced that it plans to add more features to Quay focused on improving the user experience and day 2 operations. This includes automating mirroring of namespaces, repositories, or a subset of those between multiple registries; updated support for storage backends and other content types; and content governance related updates.

Red Hat inherited Quay when it acquired CoreOS for $250 million last year. Quay was one of CoreOS’ two primary platforms alongside its Kubernetes-based Tectonic lightweight container platform. Quay was quickly integrated into Red Hat and ingeniously renamed Red Hat Quay.

The Rook cloud native storage orchestrator for Kubernetes hit its 1.0 release, which signifies the open source platform is ready for production environments.

Rook was initially developed by Upbound and released in late 2016. It was adopted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) early last year as that foundation’s first cloud native storage product. It currently sits as an incubating project within CNCF.

Rook supplies file, block, and object storage systems into the Kubernetes cluster. This allows the systems to run alongside other applications that use their data, and it makes the cloud native cluster portable across public and private clouds. It also updates existing storage systems like Ceph to work in a cloud native environment.

The 1.0 release includes an updated rook.io website, support for the latest Ceph Nautilus release, new storage protocol support, and dynamic provisioning support for Rook’s network file system (NFS) operator.

Kublr, which provides a Kubernetes distribution and container management platform, found that attendees at container-focused events are deeper into container usage than organization’s that do not attend those events.

Initial results of the survey found that 58% of attendees to the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 event in Seattle were running six or more container clusters; 30% were running between six and 20 clusters; and 28% were running 20 or more clusters in their organization. This compared with 27% of those that did not attend that event running more than six clusters; 11% running between six and 19 clusters; and 16% running more than 20 clusters.

For those looking at or running Kubernetes, 44% said that a lack of experience was their biggest hurdle to running the container orchestrator; 41% cited platform complexity; and others noted challenges with time constraints, security, and budgets.

The survey also found a pretty even split between organizations using commercial container management platforms like OpenShift or Docker Enterprise Edition (EE), those using a cloud-hosted Kubernetes service like Amazon Kubernetes Service (AKS) or Google Kubernetes Service (GKS), and those that were just using the open source version of Kubernetes on their own.