Red Hat's quarterly OpenShift update brings new service catalog

Red Hat has just released its quarterly update to the Red Hat OpenShift platform adding a new Service Catalog that enables IT or third-party vendors to create connections to internal or external services.

OpenShift is Red Hat’s platform as a service offering. The Kubernetes based service, an open source container management platform, was originally developed by Google an then the CNCF. OpenShift, which also supports Docker, has become the industry standard in container deployment and management. According to Red Hat, it adheres to the Open Container Initiative, a set of industry standards for containers.

Containers are becoming more main stream with more enterprises shifting to it from the legacy Virtual machines. As more of them join the container bandwagon, the need for platforms like OpenShift is also on the rise. This has brought Red Hat to the helm of container services with big institutions like Deutsche Bank, Volvo and United Health signing up for it.

“The adoption of container technology is off the charts. Pretty much every company is adopting containers in some way,” said Joe Fernandes, senior director of product management for OpenShift at Red Hat.

As Red Hat builds its customer base, which growing rapidly, it is working hard to update the platform to meet the needs of bigger players in the market including a request to make it easier to connect containerized applications to internal and external services. This is where the service catalog comes into the picture.

Firstly, it is not like an Appstore where developers can go in and find pre-configured connectors. It is more like an internal connector to an Oracle database or an external one to a public cloud service from AWS or Azure. While the Appstore analogy may be apt, the catalog still lacks procurement capability for now.

The catalog will be available as a technical preview for this release, the next release, which will bring it to the masses, is due at the end of this year.