Red Hat Gives an ARM Up To OpenShift Kubernetes Operations

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Red Hat is perhaps best known as a Linux operating system vendor, but it is the company's OpenShift platform that represents its fastest growing segment. Today, Red Hat announced the general availability of OpenShift 4.12, bringing a series of new capabilities to the company's hybrid cloud application delivery platform. OpenShift is based on the open source Kubernetes container orchestration system, originally developed by Google, that has been run as the flagship project of the Linux Foundation's Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) since 2014. [...] With the new release, Red Hat is integrating new capabilities to help improve security and compliance for OpenShift, as well as new deployment options on ARM-based architectures. The OpenShift 4.12 release comes as Red Hat continues to expand its footprint, announcing partnerships with Oracle and SAP this week.

The financial importance of OpenShift to Red Hat and its parent company IBM has also been revealed, with IBM reporting in its earnings that OpenShift is a $1 billion business. "Open-source solutions solve major business problems every day, and OpenShift is just another example of how Red Hat brings business and open source together for the benefit of all involved," Mike Barrett, VP of product management at Red Hat, told VentureBeat. "We're very proud of what we have accomplished thus far, but we're not resting at $1B." [...]

OpenShift, like many applications developed in the last several decades, originally was built just for the x86 architecture that runs on CPUs from Intel and AMD. That situation is increasingly changing as OpenShift is gaining more support to run on the ARM processor with the OpenShift 4.12 update. Barrett noted that Red Hat OpenShift announced support for the AWS Graviton ARM architecture in 2022. He added that OpenShift 4.12 expands that offering to Microsoft Azure ARM instances. "We find customers with a significant core consumption rate for a singular computational deliverable are gravitating toward ARM first," Barrett said.

Overall, Red Hat is looking to expand the footprint of where its technologies are able to run, which also new cloud providers. On Jan. 31, Red Hat announced that for the first time, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) would be available as a supported platform on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). While RHEL is now coming to OCI, OpenShift isn't -- at least not yet. "Right now, it's just RHEL available on OCI," Mike Evans, vice president, technical business development at Red Hat, told VentureBeat. "We're evaluating what other Red Hat technologies, including OpenShift, may come to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure but this will ultimately be driven by what our joint customers want."

Apple was the most public leader

[Ed Tice]

Apple was (is) clearly the most public leader when it comes to ARM adoption. Others have tried in the past (Microsoft with ARM-based surface tablets) and didn't get traction. But this type of quiet adoption will probably be the catalyst of a massive adoption of ARM-based systems. Now that everybody can (and does) build for ARM, there really aren't very many barriers left to widescale use.

Re:

[Midnight Thunder]

They were and they have demonstrated that it can be used for serious personal computing again. The last time that was a thing, was when the Acorn Archimedes came out.

I wonder how much of the push for ARM is the power efficiency for any piece of computation, especially with data centres try to reduce their energy footprints?

Re:

[Ed Tice]

I would guess quite a bit. Not even for ecological reasons. The thermodynamics of cooling are hard and if you can go to lower-power chips you need less sophisticated climate control and can have higher compute density.

Re:

[jfdavis668]

ARM has come a long way since being a simple follow on to the BBC Micro.

Re:Apple was the most public leader

[DarkOx]

I really think ARMs recent success in the marketplace really is owed to FOSS (some of Apple's toolchain work would be included in that) but specifically to gnu/linux.

It might be Apple and Googles FOSS contributions that really moved the needles in terms of support but as far as others going out and building ARM based products, offering ARM architecture cloud VMs, etc. That has a lot do with first class Linux kernel support and working GNU and BSD licensed tools chains and UNIX-like userspace components being available.

Contrast that with Microsoft's Windows on ARM approach that as you say went virtually nowhere. Its the open software ecosystem that has driven or at least enabled the demand for the hardware.

Re:

[Ed Tice]

I think there was a synergetic combination here. Having a viable OS for ARM architecture (and quite a few good use cases like entertainment systems) helps ensure that there is a viable ARM hardware market. Having a viable ARM market means that people are open to building software for it. But everybody was in somewhat of a wait-and-see approach. Now that apple has committed to ARM and is a big enough player that people will create MacOS versions of their software, it suddenly means that creating versions

Re:

[tlhIngan]

Apple was (is) clearly the most public leader when it comes to ARM adoption. Others have tried in the past (Microsoft with ARM-based surface tablets) and didn't get traction. But this type of quiet adoption will probably be the catalyst of a massive adoption of ARM-based systems. Now that everybody can (and does) build for ARM, there really aren't very many barriers left to widescale use.

The big reason Apple could go with ARM is because the performance of Apple's ARM chips started approaching that of Intel

Re:Whatever

[OrangeTide]

Wake up, you've overslept Mr. Rip Van Winkle. RHEL 9 supports ARM64.

"Openshift a billion dollar business"

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

So at that rate, it's only going to be another 30 or so years before IBM recoups what they paid for Redhat.

I suspect that if you were to poll IT leadership at the Fortune 500 companies that are consuming Openshift, they is more interest in getting OFF of Openshift than expanding its usage.

Re:

[KirbyCombat]

Ding!

Raspberry Pi

[imcdona]

I wonder if this opens up the possibility to run OpenShift on a raspberry pi.

Re:

[OrangeTide]

Doesn't an RPi still cost about 5x more than the original price?