Red Hat rolled out a fresh round of OpenShift updates, folding a multicloud gateway into OpenShift Container Storage 4 and additional security enhancements across its storage and broader OpenShift platform. 

The OpenShift Container Storage 4 updates are heavily based on its 2018 acquisition of cloud data management provider NooBaa. The company's platform puts a virtual layer over public and private cloud storage systems, giving developers a common interface and advanced data services for cloud-native applications. Noobaa’s ability to bring various data silos together makes it a good fit for Red Hat in helping customers avoid public cloud lock-in.

According to Red Hat, OpenShift Container Storage 4 now boasts greater abstraction and flexibility to support both traditional and emerging workloads enabled through its Red Hat Ceph Storage — which supports file, block, and object storage — with multicloud gateway technology that was gained from the Noobaa acquisition. Because of this, the vendor claims that developers can share and access sensitive application data while adhering to compliance regulations across multiple locations and platforms.

“The storage industry has evolved from differentiating on storage services to data access and portability,” wrote Ranga Rangachari, VP and GM of storage and hyperconverged infrastructure at Red Hat, in a blog post. “The addition of NooBaa’s technology and talent pool adds a competitive edge to Red Hat’s offerings tailored to address the needs of developers building tomorrow’s cloud-native applications.” 

Also included in the release are built-in data protection features, such as encryption, anonymization, key separation, and erasure coding to further drive security across disparate cloud environments, and easier integration of Rook storage orchestration. Rook is a Kubernetes-native automated support platform for deploying, packaging, and expanding storage on Red Hat's OpenShift. Red Hat introduced the Rook-Ceph Operator early last year as an upstream precursor to the release of Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4, priming OpenShift to host Rook.io Operator.  

“The integration with Rook.io Operator advances us toward the industry vision of fully self-managed, self-healing storage services delivered through Kubernetes,” Rangachari explained.

The broader OpenShift 4.3 updates include the FIPS compliant encryption and encryption of the etcd data store that is targeted at protecting confidential data used to construct containers – which are known as “secrets” – at rest.

FIPS validated cryptography is mandatory for United States federal departments that encrypt sensitive data. Etcd is the primary storage location for Kubernetes and needs to be established before Kubernetes can be run on a system. It was initially developed by CoreOS in 2013, and used as a container orchestration system before taking on its current job within the Kubernetes ecosystem. Red Hat acquired CoreOS for $250 million in early 2018.

The update also includes new capabilities and platforms to the installer, “helping customers to embrace their company’s best security practices and gain greater access control across hybrid cloud environments,” Katarki wrote. And OpenShift clusters can now be deployed to customer-managed, pre-existing virtual private networks (VPNs), virtual private clouds (VPCs), and subnets on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The 4.3 update comes three months after Red Hat's last OpenShift update. That update was focused on integrating its Service Mesh platform.

OpenShift is Red Hat’s open source container platform that uses Kubernetes to support the deployment of containers in a multicloud environment. It acts as a management layer for container deployments. The vendor launched a major 4.0 update in May.

It’s also an increasingly important part of the vendor’s operations. In fact, IBM cited OpenShift as being a key draw for the Red Hat purchase.

IHS Markit recently noted that Red Hat was a “market leader” in the container software space, holding 44% market share of segment revenue. Vladimir Galabov, principal analyst at IHS Markit, singled out the CoreOS acquisition as one of the key contributors to that position.