With the third new release this year, Red Hat OpenShift4.17 is now generally available including for IBM® Power®. You can read the release notes here and find the guide for installing OpenShift 4.17 on Power here. This release builds on features included in Red Hat OpenShift 4.15 and 4.16, including an important update to multi-architecture compute that helps clients automate their modernization journeys with Power. Other updates and enhancements for clients deploying on Power focus on scalability, resource optimization, security, developer and system administrator productivity, and more. Here is an overview of key new features and improvements specifically relevant to Power:
Kubernetes 1.30
The Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) now supports more accurate and efficient scaling by leveraging advanced metrics and prediction models. This update allows for better and faster scaling decisions, allowing clients to optimize resource utilization and reduce costs by more accurately matching infrastructure needed to compute demand. The Kubernetes scheduler has also been optimized for better performance, improving its ability to manage complex resource constraints. For security, new features for this release include strengthened policies for workload isolation and enhanced runtime protections, helping to reduce vulnerabilities and enhance security forKubernetes clusters. Several updates to enhance the user experience for developers have also been made, including better tools for debugging and managing workloads, simplifying troubleshooting, and deployment workflows.
Multiarch Tuning Operator
Included with Red Hat OpenShift 4.17 is an update to multi-architecture compute called the Multiarch Tuning Operator. The Multiarch Tuning Operator optimizes workload management across different architectures such as IBM Power, IBM Z, and x86, including single-architecture clusters transitioning to multi-architecture environments. It allows systems administrators to handle scheduling and resource allocation across these different architectures by ensuring workloads are correctly directed to the nodes of compatible architectures. The Multiarch Tuning Operator in OpenShift 4.17 further helps clients optimize resource allocation with policies that automatically place workloads on the most appropriate architecture. This also improves system administrator productivity and is especially useful with business-critical workloads that require high performance or need specific architecture capabilities, such as data-intensive applications often found running on Power.
HyperShift General Availability
With Red Hat OpenShift 4.17, HyperShift is now generally available for the Power architecture for running control planes natively. HyperShift is an open source project that provides Red Hat OpenShift control plane-as-a-service. It enables running OpenShift control planes as software abstracted from underlying virtual machines. It also allows the control plane and workers to run on different hardware or cloud platforms, allowing clients to more efficiently leverage premium hardware and reduce the infrastructure footprint required to host OpenShift clusters. This is another update included with this release of Red Hat OpenShift on Power that will allow clients to further optimize their resources and make the most of their current infrastructure.
Pricing for GPU and Accelerator Cores
Power is ideal for running AI inferencing workloads at the point of data with on-chip AI acceleration, reducing the need for GPUs that add complexity, cost, and in certain environments, unwanted noise. Clients can run AI inferencing workloads on Red Hat OpenShift on regular CPU-based cores at the same cost per core as non-accelerated workloads, optimizing costs for new AI projects and workloads compared to x86-based infrastructure. These inferencing workloads can be run on the same Power server next to mission-critical applications and databases, further optimizing costs for clients and improving performance and latency of models all while enhancing security .
Summary
Red Hat OpenShift 4.17 is all about optimizing costs and resources for clients, further improving security for sensitive data and applications, and improving productivity for developers and system administrators alike. Clients such as Printus around the world in every industry are on their modernization journeys with Red Hat on Power, and the new features and capabilities included with this release can help accelerate that. To get started on your modernization journey with Red Hat and IBM Power, go here.