Red Hat, a leading provider of enterprise open-source solutions, has launched OpenShift 4.18, the new version of a platform that provides developers and IT teams with a scalable environment for deploying containerised applications.
The hybrid cloud platform’s new features are designed to streamline operations and security across IT environments. Red Hat says the enhancements provide greater consistency for applications, including cloud-native, AI-enabled, virtualised, and traditional workloads.
According to Top Trends Impacting Infrastructure and Operations for 2025, revirtualisation/devirtualisation is one of the key trends facing organisations. As shifts in the virtualisation market prompt organisations to re-evaluate their virtualised infrastructure and strategies, opportunities may arise to implement technologies that meet current IT needs while enhancing future readiness.
“Many organisations have reached an inflection point with their virtualised infrastructure, needing to make decisions quickly on their future direction,” says Mike Barrett, VP and GM of hybrid cloud platforms at Red Hat.
“Red Hat OpenShift meets today’s virtualisation needs and offers a simplified pathway to migration, but also enables organisations to keep an eye on the future via application modernisation.
“With Red Hat OpenShift, organisations are able to protect their traditional investments while adopting a platform that enables them to seamlessly transition to an AI future.”
The latest OpenShift enhancements aim to improve virtual machine and container management while offering a unified infrastructure for implementing generative AI initiatives.
Enhanced experience
OpenShift 4.18 features new virtualisation enhancements to improve networking, simplify storage migration, and streamline virtual machine (VM) management. Red Hat says the updates reduce operational complexity, enhance flexibility and improve resource efficiency – making it easier to manage and adapt virtualised environments as needs evolve.
Virtualisation improvements:
- VM-friendly networking provides support for common VM networking use cases with the general availability of user-defined networks. This feature is available with OpenShift on AWS and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, providing users with similar networking capabilities for secondary networks on AWS as they have on-premises, enabling greater hybrid cloud flexibility.
- VM storage migration, available as a technology preview, now includes enhancements thatallow for non-disruptive movement of data between storage devices and storage classes while a VM is running, enabling users to be agile as storage needs change.
- Tree-view navigation, available as a technology preview, enables users to logically group VMs into folders which enables a more granular grouping. With logical grouping, available as a technology preview, users can navigate between VMs quickly.
OpenShift 4.18 enhances user-defined networks with Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), says Red Hat, which improves segmentation and supports advanced use cases like VM static IP assignment, live migration and stronger multi-tenancy.
Extending choice for hybrid cloud innovation
OpenShift 4.18 expands support to public cloud providers, providing users with increased flexibility for how and where they choose to run their workloads. OpenShift supports bare-metal deployments on Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OpenShift Virtualisation is available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a technology preview for users looking for virtualisation in the public cloud.
Simplified operations for security
OpenShift 4.18 has new security features designed to drive more resilient operations while decreasing potential risks. Secret store container storage interface (CSI) driver is generally available and provides users with a vendor-agnostic solution for managing credentials and sensitive information for applications.
Workloads on OpenShift can access external secrets managers without storing secrets on the cluster, says Red Hat, enhancing security hygiene and simplifying credential management. This allows for clusters to remain unaware of secrets, thereby reducing risk. Secret Store CSI Driver enhances complementary solutions, such as OpenShift GitOps and OpenShift Pipelines, by enabling them to consume secrets from an external secrets manager in a more secure way.
* For more information on OpenShift 4.18, visit the website here.
