Red Hat is dedicated to creating a comprehensive technology ecosystem for customers to access a range of solutions for their infrastructure needs, using Red Hat certification to apply a common criteria for dependable interoperability, enhanced security and collaborative support. In the case of Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, certification is built around Operators, the Kubernetes framework that offers customers a more consistent way to manage the lifecycle of their workloads. Red Hat OpenShift Certified Operators allow customers to use the operational expertise of application providers, reducing configuration drift and driving better consistency and supportability.
Last month, the OpenShift partner ecosystem reached an important milestone: over 100 certified Operators, developed by more than 80 Red Hat partners and covering a broad range of solutions for cloud-native environments, such as developer tools, databases, monitoring and logging, AI/ML, and big data, to name a few. Since the introduction of Red Hat OpenShift 4 last year, Red Hat has seen sustained momentum across application providers as they embrace OpenShift as a Kubernetes platform of choice for enterprise deployments.
Kubernetes has evolved rapidly over the project’s relatively short lifetime, adding more services and features with each release. Of particular importance to Red Hat’s partners are those features that facilitate integration of third party products through well-defined interfaces, such as Container Networking Interface (CNI) and Container Storage Interface (CSI), and those that offer workloads a better control and usage of cluster resources, such as multiple network interfaces or NUMA. These added capabilities exemplify the strengths of an open platform, enabling innovation around Kubernetes while maintaining common standards for definition, provisioning and maintenance of third party products and solutions.
Given the rapid growth of the OpenShift Certified Operator ecosystem and the scope of Kubernetes, it is important to enhance Red Hat certification to keep the pace and add depth in key platform areas. We are excited to extend Red Hat OpenShift Operator Certification, starting with three use cases:
- Products that deliver networking services through a Kubernetes CNI plugin. CNI allows integration of different solutions through a common interface, offering more infrastructure choices and access to multiple network providers through Multus.
- Storage backends that integrate through a Kubernetes CSI driver, so workloads can access a variety of persistent (block and file) storage and connect to existing infrastructure through a modular approach.
- Cloud-native Network Functions (CNFs) delivered using a container format and Kubernetes features, helping Telco customers to increase the efficiency of their infrastructure to meet the growing demand from services like 5G and edge computing.
In all cases, Red Hat will build upon the solid foundation of our existing OpenShift Operator Certification, providing confidence that the container images are trusted and secure (based on UBI) and that the application enables automated operation and maintenance through the Operator Framework. On top of these base criteria, Red Hat is adding domain-specific requirements, such as verifying that storage or networking capabilities from a third party product are correctly integrated and delivered in OpenShift. Products that meet these criteria will be granted the corresponding certification badge and listed as such in the Red Hat certified catalog. In addition, partners with certification badges can choose to resell those products via Red Hat Marketplace, an open cloud marketplace that makes it easier to discover and access certified software for container-based environments in the cloud or on-prem.
This approach deepens our assurance in areas critical to cloud-native infrastructure, while maintaining the high standards already established for Certified Operators. We are starting with these three badges and will add others over time.
If you are a partner working with CNI, CSI or CNF, we invite you to join Red Hat Partner Connect and certify your software. If you are an OpenShift customer that relies on any of these technologies, ask your software vendors to collaborate with Red Hat and earn their badge.
About the author
Hugo Rivero leads the strategy and implementation of Red Hat certification for software partners, a key foundation to establish and grow a vibrant ecosystem around our open source portfolio. He has more than twenty years of experience bringing together technology companies to deliver multi-vendor solutions on platforms such as Unix, Java, Linux, OpenStack and Kubernetes. As part of the Partner Ecosystem team at Red Hat, he is passionate about delivering on the "tried, tested, trusted" promise.
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