IBM subsidiary Red Hat put its recently acquired StackRox assets to work, rolling out a new version of its OpenShift cloud platform that incorporates security, cluster management and registry capabilities in a single package.
Specifically, the new OpenShift Platform Plus bundles Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes and Red Hat Quay. Among other things, the company stated the security component provides in-depth data collection and analysis and offers the ability to set and enforce more than 60 security policies.
Stuart Miniman, director of market insights for Red Hat’s Cloud Platforms, told Fierce the Plus package will become the company’s new top-tier offering, sitting above OpenShift in the middle and its base-level OpenShift Kubernetes Engine product.
He noted the bundle is the result of a confluence of factors, including its purchase of cloud security vendor StackRox earlier this year, an increased focus on security among enterprises and the growing prevalence of multi-cloud, multi-cluster environments.
“It was kind of the coming together of we had this new security piece, we think it was going to be something that should basically be added by default, the multi-cluster management is something that we’ve seen ramping demand on and even the global registry…more of our customers are asking for an alternative” to Docker, he explained.
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Integration
Red Hat closed its acquisition of StackRox in February. Miniman said it was able to incorporate the company’s technology into its new OpenShift Platform Plus package so quickly because both OpenShift and StackRox’s technology are based on Kubernetes. He added half of StackRox customers overlapped with OpenShift customers.
“There wasn’t a whole lot we needed to do to have StackRox work in this environment,” he said, but added Red Hat is working on updates to bring the StackRox user interface more in line with the rest of its portfolio.
OpenShift Platform Plus will be Red Hat’s “lead option going forward,” Miniman continued, and will be the focus of efforts to integrate additional features.
“These are the pieces that we have today. The expectation is this is going to be the vehicle for more in the future…If there were any acquisitions in the future this could be a mechanism for there or if there are other pieces of the Red Hat portfolio that made sense to pull into OpenShift we can pull it here,” he said.
Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus will be available in Q2 2021.