Red Hat ditches CodeReady name for dev environments

Red Hat has unveiled new versions of its in-browser and local development environments geared to work with the OpenShift Kubernetes platform.

Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces 3 is the renamed, repackaged Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces, while Red Hat OpenShift Local 2 is the new name for Red Hat CodeReady Containers.

OpenShift Dev Spaces uses OpenShift and containers to provide development and IT teams with a consistent development environment. Version 3 features the new DevWorkspace engine, replacing the CodeReady Workspaces Java REST service with a Kubernetes controller that runs behind the kube-apiserver for better scalability and high availability. 

Also featured in this version is a universal API. The development team cited a simpler design achieved by decoupling the Dev Spaces workspace engine from the developer’s IDE and server-side components.

Red Hat OpenShift Local 2 provides developers a way to build OpenShift clusters on their desktop while emulating the cloud development environment locally. Designed to run on a local computer, OpenShift Local simplifies testing and setup and provides tools for building container-based applications, Red Hat said. 

Presets let developers select either the default local OpenShift bundle or Podman for a more-focused container runtime that minimizes development setup. The new version also features slimmer binaries, made possible by decoupling the OpenShift machine bundle for the command-line tool download. 

Developers gain the flexibility to choose alternate bundles to fit their specific project. A new system tray provides more consistency across different operating systems.

Red Hat also cited other tools improvements during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2022 announcements which included that Docker Desktop has a new extension, in a preview release stage, enabling users to deploy a container image to OpenShift.

Meanwhile, Tekton Chains lets OpenShift Pipelines provide built-in image-signing capabilities to enhance application delivery.

The Shipwright framework for building container images for Kubernetes now has volume support, a wider range of options, and the ability to build custom images from the local directory.

In addition, the odo 3.0 CLI tool for deploying applications on OpenShift and Kubernetes has been updated, focused on guided on-boarding, the outer loop developer experience, and devfile adoption for consistency across the portfolio.

Further, the latest release of OpenShift GitOps, for managing OpenShift clusters, includes Argo CD 2.3, for new sync and diff strategies and improvements to the UI and performance.

Other updates include news that Devfile, a Kubernetes-native API, now is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project while Knative/Serverless functions tools enable developers leveraging Visual Studio Code editor and the IntelliJ IDE to deploy serverless applications.