What’s new in Red Hat OpenShift Platform 4.3

Last January, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift 4.3. As you all know OpenShift is the most popular and used distribution of Kubernetes worldwide. While OpenShift has many powerful features for DevOps environments, security concerns are one of the main concerns for users and customers. When we offer our training courses in OpenShift we joke that the rule in this “world” is features first, security later (if it arrives). That’s why this new release primarily focuses on improving in this area, but also includes improvements in storage and the user interface.

Security

OpenShift 4.3 offers for the first time FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) encryption and additional security enhancements for businesses across industries to help protect sensitive customer data with stronger encryption controls. It also seeks to improve access control monitoring through new features that have to do with role-based access and user and application authorization control in general.

On the other hand, you can install the module (kubernetes operator)“Quay Container Security”that allows to know the vulnerabilities of our PODs

Storage

This release also coincides with the overall availability of Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4,which provides greater portability, simplicity, and scale for data-centric Kubernetes workloads. Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4, which is designed to deliver multi-cloud storage through gateway technologies across providers (Amazon, Google, Azure). This is made possible by NooBaa’s Software Defined Storage (SDS) solution, a company recently acquired by Red Hat. In this way, customers can deploy their services across multiple public clouds, while operating from a unified dashboard that covers not only applications but also storage.

User interface

The topology view is an interface designed for developers, allowing them to not only understand the structure of their applications, but modify their configuration and even connectivity with other services directly from the console as seen in the next image. Topology view has been greatly improved, showing real-time changes.

And allowing functions such as modifying connectivity between applications and services, as well as removing them.

Supplanting users

Imagine you’re a cluster administrator where there are thousands of users. As soon as you get to your job, you’ll most likely get a ticket where a developer complains about has console issues or some of the features of Red Hat OpenShift. Well, since version 4.3, it is possible to impersonate users, or what is the same thing to pass us as the user that we want. Using your roles and specific configuration we can perform typical troubleshooting tasks much faster and easier.

Other improvements

Thanks to the Tektonproject, in OpenShift version 4.3, users can activate the“pipelines”of any application. Once associated, they will appear in the topology view along with their real-time logs. Support for KNative,server-less kubernetes technology, is also included for the first time and as a technology preview.

Want to know more?

In Sixe Engineering we have been working with OpenShift since 2013 (version 2.0) We offer professional services and private training. Contact us and tell us what you need.