Overview
DevOps is an approach to culture, automation, and platform design that’s intended to promote a more efficient working relationship between development and operations teams, leading to faster and more frequent delivery of software applications and associated features. Red Hat offers a full stack platform powered by Red Hat® OpenShift® and Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform to enable more secure DevOps, helping your teams work more efficiently and supporting innovation.
Why DevOps is important
In order for an idea (like a new software feature, request for enhancement, or a bug fix) to become a reality, development teams and operations teams must communicate frequently and approach their work collaboratively.
Traditionally, this collaboration hasn’t always been present. In the past, development teams and operations teams have worked separately, with different sets of tools as well as fundamentally different mindsets regarding how to best serve an organization.
While development teams believe that creating change is a critical part of their role in the organization, operations teams tend to resist change because it can potentially undermine stability and reliability, which is a critical part of their role. These mismatched goals have historically created a metaphorical “wall” between the two teams, causing confusion, frustration, and significant delays during the process of handing off code from one team to the other.
DevOps aims to break down these barriers in favor of a more cohesive team approach.
Red Hat resources
What makes for a successful DevOps platform?
Beyond the culture shift, successfully implementing DevOps requires a platform that includes key capabilities natively (and provides flexibility of ecosystem integrations) to enable a more agile, and iterative development and delivery of applications in a consistent way, anywhere across the hybrid and multicloud.
Developer productivity
To offer a more efficient and secure DevOps platform, developer tools and security practices need to be considered from the start. An effective DevOps platform allows the flexibility for developers to choose the tools that work best for them while offering a pre-hardened foundation with CI/CD, security capabilities, and a broad partner ecosystem. Developers can spend their time innovating rather than dwelling on business requirements or security protocol.
Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD)
CI/CD pipelines are required by modern application development teams to automate the testing and building of code and to deliver applications running across any DevOps platform. Integrating and automating CI/CD pipelines throughout the software development lifecycle gives developer and operations teams the visibility they need to build a secure, high quality platform to deliver applications faster.
Security and compliance
Modern DevOps platforms include CI/CD security controls and vulnerability management earlier in the process. “DevSecOps” is an evolution of DevOps commonly used to refer to the process of shifting security controls and vulnerability management left in the development process. Integrating security requirements and practices earlier into the software development lifecycle minimizes vulnerabilities within the supply chain.
Configuration and infrastructure automation
Configuration and infrastructure automation lets you manage resources together to support application deployments. From public cloud to private cloud, to networking and security infrastructure, automation provides the functionality needed to coordinate and manage diverse IT environments simply and effectively.
Hybrid and multicloud infrastructure foundation
Modern DevOps platforms should be based on a consistent hybrid and multicloud infrastructure foundation. This is usually enabled by containers and Kubernetes, often using enterprise-grade Linux as the container host operating system – all leveraged to provide a secure, cost effective solution.
It should also include key capabilities to automate and simplify the Day 1 and Day 2 operations (e.g. install, updates, management, observability, image registry, etc.), and integrations with the technology ecosystem to enable flexibility with using the tooling of choice for various aspects of the platform. Also there should be an option to consume the platform as a cloud service or self-managed software, anywhere.
How Red Hat enables a DevOps platform with OpenShift and Ansible
Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible along with our consulting services and partner ecosystem enable a DevOps platform along with the much needed people and process transformation. These solutions break down barriers between development and operations teams while continuously delivering, monitoring, and measuring performance.
Red Hat OpenShift is a unified platform to build, modernize, and deploy applications at scale. Built on Kubernetes and ideal for container orchestration, it delivers a consistent experience for operations and development teams alike across public cloud, on-premise, hybrid cloud, or edge architectures.
Furthermore, OpenShift, when combined with Red Hat Developer Hub, provides platform engineering teamswith the tools they need to effectively build and manage an internal developer platform (IDP) and create the project templates, documentation, and workflows needed to build “golden paths.”
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform provides an enterprise framework for building and operating IT automation at scale, from hybrid cloud to the edge. It enables users across an organization to create, share, and manage automation—from development and operations to security and network teams.
In conjunction with Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Ansible works great for automating (managing and configuring) off-cluster resources, orchestrating them as part of DevOps workflows.
Implement DevOps across the hybrid and multicloud
Developer productivity tools
Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces provides developers with a faster, consistent, and a more reliable development environment, and gives IT operations centralized control. OpenShift capabilities such as Serverless and Service Mesh, and Red Hat Application Services capabilities such as application runtimes and frameworks, API management, data streaming, event driven services etc. empower developers with self-service access to the languages and tooling and improves their productivity. If developers have a specific tool of choice, Red Hat offers access to a vast ecosystem of partner solutions compatible with OpenShift.
OpenShift GitOps capability enables DevOps teams to implement GitOps workflows. By utilizing a GitOps framework, updates and changes are pushed through declarative code, automating infrastructure and deployment requirements, and CI/CD, helping organizations to realize faster, more secure, scalable software development.
OpenShift Pipelines is a CI/CD capability designed to run each step of the CI/CD pipeline in its own container and allows each step to scale independently to meet the demands of the pipeline. For an operations team that is trying to optimize its infrastructure resources, limiting the resources required to support pipelines during quiet periods helps reduce the cost and overhead for running the pipeline the developers need.
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Security and compliance
Red Hat OpenShift enables security and compliance by ensuring security controls and guardrails are integrated into DevOps workflows and applied early and throughout the lifecycle, from vulnerability scanning and artifact signing to configuration management, compliance, access control, and threat detection. This helps deliver a trusted and hardened software supply chain without inhibiting development and deployment velocity.
Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes helps protect containerized Kubernetes workloads in all major clouds and hybrid platforms, including Red Hat OpenShift, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes controls clusters and applications from a single console, with built-in security policies. This capability supports managing across environments and at scale allowing app deployment, multiple cluster management, and policy enforcement across multiple clusters. Red Hat’s solution ensures compliance, monitors usage, and maintains consistency.
Configuration and infrastructure automation
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform integrates into DevOps pipelines enabling orchestration of infrastructure for application deployments, configuration management, and application and infrastructure updates. Using automation to support DevOps processes for developing, testing, and deploying on public and private cloud environments leads to more reliable deployments.
Ansible has more than 100 certified content collections maintained by Red Hat and its technology partners to ensure support for DevOps in hybrid IT environments.
Hybrid and multicloud infrastructure foundation
Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible are built on a fully supported and consistent hybrid and multicloud infrastructure foundation based on the enterprise grade Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Operating System (OS). In OpenShift, RHEL serves as the container host OS, along with containers, Kubernetes, and many other fully supported capabilities (e.g. install, updates, management, observability, image registry, etc.) based on open source community projects. Both OpenShift and Ansible can be consumed as a public cloud-service or as self-managed software. Both have a broad certified technology partner ecosystem with deep integrations to enable flexibility and choice.
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