10 must-read application development blog posts from this year

Writing software is complex, and as the industry continues to grow in size and scope, there’s plenty of opportunity to streamline the processes of both development and delivery. Using a dump of traffic logs and the awk command, I’ve compiled a list of the top 10 articles we’ve published this year on the topic of application development.

1. DevOps and Platform Engineering: What’s the difference?

In this article, Gordon Haff explains everything you need to understand DevOps and platform engineering, two popular approaches to software development and IT operations.

DevOps, originating from the Agile methodology, focuses on increasing communication between development and operations teams to enable automation and continuous improvement over the lifecycle of an application.

Platform engineering emerged as a response to growing complexity of cloud computing and container platforms. It prioritizes the creation of efficient and self-service developer experiences by providing well-supported, autonomous platforms and tools that allow developers to focus on delivering business value without worrying about infrastructure maintenance.

For more insight into managing development, read the article.

2. Introducing OpenShift Service Mesh 2.5

Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh 2.5 is an update based on Istio 1.18 and Kiali 1.73. This release introduced the general availability of Service Mesh on Arm, support for certificate revocation lists for external traffic, and integration of the OpenShift Service Mesh Console plugin with the Kiali operator. It updated distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry and Tempo (deprecating the Jaeger and Elasticsearch operators). Additionally, it introduced IPv4 and IPv6 dual stack support as a developer preview feature.

Read the article for all the details.

3. Improving the developer experience with Testcontainers and OpenShift

Red Hat and the Testcontainers team at Docker have partnered to provide the full power of Testcontainers in Red Hat OpenShift. Testcontainers is an open source testing library that provides an easy and lightweight API for bootstrapping integration tests with real services running as containers. This allows a developer to write tests that interact with the same types of services an application is expected to use in production. Using that on OpenShift means you gain consistency and scalability along with the Testcontainers dynamic development test environment.

To find out more, read the article.

4. Migrate and modernize virtual machines with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and Dell APEX Cloud Platform

This article covers another partnership, this time between Red Hat and Dell. If you use virtual machines in your development workflow, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization implemented on Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift can simplify your deployment, management, and migration. The Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift, jointly engineered with Red Hat, is the first fully integrated infrastructure purpose-built for Red Hat OpenShift, enabling enterprises to run bare-metal containers and virtual machines on a common infrastructure.

Read the article.

5. Redefining development: The retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) revolution in software engineering

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) combines information retrieval with natural language generation. A retriever finds relevant information from collections of data, and a generator creates new and contextually relevant content based on that data. RAG enhances AI-generated content quality by using domain-specific knowledge outside the original large language model’s training data.

In software development, RAG can be applied to code generation, documentation, and even troubleshooting. It’s also being used in hybrid cloud computing environments to help with data management, model training, and resource allocation.

Read the article to learn more.

6. Red Hat transforms application connectivity for the hybrid cloud with Red Hat Connectivity Link

The developer preview of Red Hat Connectivity Link provides an application connectivity solution for programmers serving a hybrid multicloud environment. Red Hat Connectivity Link is built upon the open source Kuadrant project, and helps manage connections across multiple Kubernetes clusters. Specifically, it can handle multi-cluster ingress management, global load balancing, rate limiting, API protection, and authentication and authorization.

Read the article.

7. Announcing the Red Hat build of Apache Camel 4 for smoother enterprise integration

Red Hat’s build of Apache Camel 4 is available as part of Red Hat Application Foundations. Apache Camel is designed to help you integrate with common enterprise integration patterns (EIP). Apache Camel allows you to define routing and mediation rules in several different domain-specific languages, including Java, Groovy, YAML, and XML. Apache Camel 4 supports popular Java frameworks, and includes over 100 hardened components to enhance system integrations. The toolkit provides advanced integration design patterns, a suite of components for common integration needs, and compatibility with Red Hat OpenShift for building and maintaining application integrations in Kubernetes and serverless environments.

Read the article.

8. Optimize application life cycles with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.10

In this article, Gil Cattelain highlights the ways Red Hat Enterprise Linux lays a solid foundation of continuous support, technological advances, and framework and programming language availability. With new features for data backup, recovery, and high availability clustering, RHEL 8 provides a stable foundation for development. Even as RHEL 8 enters its maintenance support phase, developers can rely on security updates until 2029, with options for in-place upgrades and migration assistance when it’s time to move to newer versions.

Read the article.

9. How to find and execute high-impact application modernization opportunities faster with the new migration toolkit for applications 7.0

When you set up a new application platform, it means you must adapt your existing applications for it. This alone can cause an organization to delay an important upgrade. To make it easier for you to migrate your applications, Red Hat released the migration toolkit for applications 7.0 in January 2024. Based on the open source Konveyor project, the migration toolkit for applications helps development teams modernize and migrate applications to Red Hat OpenShift with tools and best practices designed to accelerate your journey into the hybrid cloud.

Read the article.

10. How to implement a cloud-native application architecture

What does it take to build a cloud-native application? Ruby Yang explains the steps you must take, in this article. She explains that there are four phases: Development and initial integration, continuous integration and container management, testing and validation, and deployment and production readiness. Cloud-native solutions offer a path to agility, scalability, and an improved security posture.

To learn more about it, [read the article]