Unveiling Red Hat OpenShift 4.15

We’re pleased to announce Red Hat OpenShift 4.15 is now generally available. Based on Kubernetes 1.28 and CRI-O 1.28, this latest version focuses on the core platform, the edge, and virtualization while accelerating modern application development and delivery across the hybrid cloud through a trusted, consistent, and comprehensive platform.

This blog highlights key features of Red Hat OpenShift 4.15. A comprehensive list of the Red Hat OpenShift 4.15 innovations and updates may be found in the Red Hat OpenShift 4.15 Release Notes.

What’s New in Red Hat OpenShift 4.15 Infographic by Sunil Malagi

Use OpenShift on AWS Outposts or AWS Wavelength for Edge Applications

We’re pleased to announce the General Availability for AWS Outposts and AWS Wavelength Zones with Red Hat OpenShift 4.15. Cluster administrators can now install Red Hat OpenShift clusters on AWS with remote workers in AWS Outposts in order to run their compute and low-latency applications on AWS managed infrastructure on-premises for a consistent hybrid experience.

AWS Wavelength is an AWS Infrastructure optimized for mobile edge computing applications, wherein AWS compute and storage services are embedded within communications service providers’ data centers at the edge of the 5G network. By placing application servers in an AWS Wavelength Zone, application traffic from the 5G devices does not need to leave the 5G network, thus eliminating the latency that typically results from application traffic traversing multiple hops across the internet to reach their destination. In this latest release, cluster administrators can now deploy Red Hat OpenShift in AWS with compute nodes in AWS Wavelength Zones with both installer provisioned infrastructure or user provisioned infrastructure, where administrators can use existing VPCs with compute nodes in AWS Wavelength Zones and existing subnets. For existing Red Hat OpenShift deployments, administrators can also add additional compute nodes that can be automatically scaled into AWS Wavelength Zones. Learn more at Installing a cluster on AWS with worker nodes on AWS Wavelength Zones.

Modernize your Infrastructure with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization offers customers a way to modernize their virtualized infrastructure. Customers  and partners such as Lockheed-Martin, Turk Telecom, Dell, AWS, sahibinden.com, and many more use Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to provide virtual machines alongside cloud-native applications, while driving management consistency across all applications for operational efficiency. 

According to Gökhan Ergül, CTO of sahibinden.com, “Red Hat technology stands out from the competition in terms of its ability to run virtualized workloads and container workloads in a streamlined and well-integrated manner. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization enables us to replatform virtual machines alongside containerized applications on a Kubernetes powered application platform.  Additionally, we can refactor our virtualized applications into containerized microservices while being able to manage existing infrastructure investments. We now have the open source agility and tools, combined with the DevOps and automation workflows, to continue creating competitive services for our business.” See sahibinden.com delivers reliable retail services faster with Red Hat OpenShift for more information.

In this latest release, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization adds additional resilience and disaster recovery capabilities. We’ve promoted to General Availability the ability for customers to protect ACM-managed virtual machine workloads with the Metro-DR solution for Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation. We’ve also added network hot plugging to dynamically reconfigure network interface cards used for the running virtual machines. Last but not least, we’ve streamlined virtual machine creation based on instance types with minimal steps.

Public cloud experience for VM creation using Instance Types

OVN IPsec support between Red Hat OpenShift and an external provider

Many customers need to encrypt all data in-transit to comply with various industry regulations. This has posed a challenge for how Red Hat OpenShift accesses storage from appliances, such as a storage appliance that uses NFS and iSCSI. To that end, we’ve enhanced OVN Kubernetes’ existing intracluster IPsec capability to also support encrypting traffic between Red Hat OpenShift and an IPsec-configured external provider.

Network monitoring enhanced with infrastructure, kernel subsystem and ingress dashboards

With Red Hat OpenShift 4.15, we’ve expanded the core networking observability dashboard collection to include metrics that were previously not captured by the Network Observability Operator's eBPF agent that produces the netflow data displayed in current dashboards. New metrics are displayed in three new observability dashboards covering network infrastructure, the Linux kernel subsystem, and Kubernetes ingress traffic. Examples from the networking infrastructure dashboard include insights into networking configuration, TCP latency probes, control plane resources, and worker resources for clusters that use OVN-Kubernetes.  Metrics in the Linux subsystem dashboard include network utilization, network saturation, and network errors. The Ingress dashboard includes information on sharding and much more. For customers with OpenShift on bare metal deployments, they can now also view MetalLB metrics between MetalLB and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) peers. Install the Network Observability Operator included with the latest release, and explore the new network dashboards.

Admin Network Policy to help improve the security of cluster network traffic (Technology Preview)

Cluster administrators want to be able to enforce higher levels of application security at the cluster-wide level. In Red Hat OpenShift 4.14, we introduced the Admin Network Policy feature, as a Technology Preview, for Red Hat OpenShift clusters running OVN-Kubernetes to help improve the security of their cluster network traffic flow – specifically, we added the ability to use AdminNetworkPolicies (ANP) and BaselineAdminNetworkPolicy (BANP) policy layers to enhance the security of your intra-cluster network traffic. The Admin Network Policy feature remains in Technology Preview.

Hosted control planes support for virtual hosts with the agent provider (Technology Preview)

Hosted control planes for virtual hosts with the agent provider is now available as a Technology Preview with Red Hat OpenShift 4.15. Hosted control planes is a feature in Red Hat OpenShift that allows you to create control planes as pods on a hosting cluster without the need for dedicated virtual or physical machines for each control plane. This can reduce infrastructure costs by 3x, optimizes cluster deployment time and separates management and workload concerns so that customers can focus on their applications. Hosted control planes for virtual hosts with the agent provider are enabled through the multicluster engine for Kubernetes operator version 2.5.

Unified monitoring with Red Hat build of OpenTelemetry

Red Hat build of OpenTelemetry, based on the open source OpenTelemetry project, provides unified, standardized, and vendor-neutral telemetry data collection for cloud-native environments. This is a key component of observability in Red Hat OpenShift, which serves an important function in driving the reliability, performance, and enhanced security of applications and infrastructure. the Red Hat build of OpenTelemetry provides support for deploying and managing the OpenTelemetry Collector and simplifying the workload instrumentation. The OpenTelemetry Collector receives, processes, and forwards telemetry data in multiple formats, making it the ideal component for telemetry processing and interoperability between telemetry systems. The Collector provides a unified solution for collecting and processing metrics, traces, and logs. See the Red Hat build of OpenTelemetry Release Notes for more details.

More efficient power monitoring for cloud native sustainability (Technology Preview)

Optimizing power consumption in Kubernetes environments is essential for efficient resource management. In OpenShift 4.15, we promote power monitoring for Red Hat OpenShift to Technology Preview. Power monitoring is based on Kepler, the Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter. Power monitoring for Red Hat OpenShift utilizes proven cloud-native methodologies and technologies such as extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF), CPU performance counters, and machine learning models to estimate power consumption by workloads and export them as metrics. These metrics are then used for scheduling, scaling, reporting, and visualization, which arms cluster administrators with information on the carbon footprint of their cloud native workload.

Power Monitoring for Red Hat OpenShift Dashboard

Deliver applications to the edge with Red Hat Device Edge

Red Hat Device Edge with MicroShift is a Kubernetes distribution derived from OpenShift Container Platform that is designed for small form factor devices and edge computing. We’re excited to share two new capabilities in Red Hat Device Edge:

• Operators with Red Hat Device Edge: Customers and partners can now use Operator Lifecycle Management (OLM) to install and manage  operators on MicroShift. This helps simplify common operations, such as databases or messaging/event systems at the edge. To keep the OLM resource consumption low, users create their own specially curated operator catalog which contains only the needed operators.  All this works in air gapped and offline scenarios by embedding the required container images into the operating system image.
• Machine vision on Arm with Red Hat Device Edge: Customers can now run machine vision workloads, such as model inferencing, on Arm-based platforms like NVIDIA Jetson Orin. The required hardware enablement is part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.3, which is now supported as the base operating system for MicroShift.

Try Red Hat OpenShift 4.15 Today

Get started today with the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console and take advantage of the latest features and enhancements. To find out what’s next, check out the following resources:

• What’s New and What’s Next in Red Hat OpenShift
• OpenShift YouTube Channel
• OpenShift Blogs
• OpenShift Commons
• Red Hat Developer Blogs
• Red Hat Portfolio Architecture Center

Thank you for reading about what’s new in Red Hat OpenShift 4.15. Please comment or send us feedback through your Red Hat contacts, or create an issue on OpenShift in GitHub.