Red Hat OpenShift 4.20, the newest iteration of the company's hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, is now generally available. This release focuses on uniting enterprise IT by streamlining cloud and container management, offering a unified foundation for managing both traditional and modern applications across data centers, public clouds, and edge environments.

Key Features and Enhancements

Red Hat OpenShift 4.20 introduces several key capabilities and enhancements:

• Accelerated AI Workloads: OpenShift 4.20 helps accelerate AI projects, enabling them to run in production faster and more reliably. New features streamline the deployment and management of complex AI workloads, making them easier to scale and manage. The LeaderWorkerSet (LWS) API simplifies the management of large, distributed AI workloads with automated orchestration and scaling. The Image volume source allows new models to be integrated in minutes without rebuilding application containers. Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables cluster management via developer tools like Visual Studio Code.
• Strengthened Platform Security: This release significantly strengthens the platform's security posture, addressing both immediate threats and the evolving security needs of enterprise IT. It hardens the platform for sovereignty requirements and helps secure main traffic between control plane components with initial support for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms for mTLS, delivering long-term cryptographic protection for critical communications. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security 4.9 is generally available, along with enhancements to Red Hat Trusted Artifact Signer and Red Hat Trusted Profile Analyzer, which help customers manage and analyze security data more easily. A zero trust workload identity manager is scheduled for release later this year, delivering identity attestation for machines and humans across federated infrastructure.
• Enhanced Virtualization Strategies: Red Hat continues to optimize Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, enabling customers to manage virtual machines (VMs) alongside containers and cloud-native applications from a single platform. The addition of CPU load-aware rebalancing and Arm support improves performance and resource utilization for virtualized workloads. Expanded hybrid cloud support extends Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to bare-metal deployments on Oracle Cloud, giving organizations more control over their infrastructure and data placement.
• Digital Sovereignty: OpenShift 4.20 provides a unified and efficient foundation with systems security at the forefront, enabling sovereign deployments and accelerating the development and deployment of applications and AI workloads across hybrid cloud environments. It helps organizations maintain control over their cloud destiny, deciding which applications and data must run in-house and which exist outside that domain.

Additional Features and Improvements

• Bring-Your-Own OpenID Connect (OIDC): Enables customers to use their existing OpenID Connect (OIDC) infrastructure, providing greater control over user data.
• "Sidecar-less" Ambient Mode with Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh: Lowers the cost of pod-to-pod mTLS encryption, identity-based traffic policies, and observability, helping reduce infrastructure costs, operational complexity, and resource overhead.
• External Secrets Operator (ESO): Provides lifecycle management for secrets fetched from external secret management systems, helping improve security.
• Two-Node OpenShift with Arbiter: Enables a new high-availability form factor, reducing infrastructure costs without sacrificing resiliency.
• Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) in OVN-Kubernetes: Delivers new networking capabilities to on-premises environments by providing continuous route exchange between OpenShift and external network fabrics, resulting in faster adaptation to network changes, VM migration, or failover events.
• User Namespaces: Enhances security by isolating container users from host users, reducing the risk of privilege escalation attacks, and allowing containers to run as non-root users on the host while retaining internal root privileges for operations.

Red Hat OpenShift 4.20 delivers a comprehensive platform for enterprises seeking to streamline IT operations, accelerate AI adoption, enhance security, and maintain control over their hybrid cloud environments.