Red Hat updates OpenShift container platform with new service catalog

Red Hat issued its quarterly update to the OpenShift platform today, adding among other things, a Service Catalog that enables IT or third-party vendors to create connections to internal or external services.

OpenShift is RedHat’s Platform as a Service, based on Kubernetes, the open source container management platform, which was originally developed by Google. It also supports Docker, a popular container platform,  and adheres to the Open Container Initiative, a set of industry standards for containers, according to the company.

As companies make the shift from virtual machines to containers, there is an increasing need for platforms like OpenShift, and Red Hat is seeing massive interest from companies as varying as Deutsche Bank, Volvo and United Health.

OpenShift is a technology that’s helping these companies, and many others make that transition to containers, says Joe Fernandes, senior director of product management for OpenShift at Red Hat. “The adoption of container technology is off the charts. Pretty much every company is adopting containers in some way,” he said.

As the company increases its container customer base, it’s trying to build out the platform to meet the needs of larger company IT departments. One of the things they’ve been hearing is that they want it to be easier to connect containerized applications to internal and external services.

The Service Catalog is not unlike an app store in that developers can go in and find pre-configured connectors. This could be an internal connector to an Oracle database or an external one to a public cloud service from AWS or Azure (or anything else). Fernandes says the app store analogy is apt, but points out that it doesn’t have any procurement capability, at least for now. It could in the future, he says.

Customers were able to make these service connections before, but it took a lot more effort. The goal is to provide a packaged approach so that users don’t have to do the work every time, which should help speed up implementation.

The Service Catalog is available as a technical preview for this release. The next release is due before the end of the year.

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