Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes is a collection of cloud-native application runtimes that are optimized to run on OpenShift, including Eclipse Vert.x, Node.js, Spring Boot, and WildFly Swarm. In addition, OpenShift Application Runtimes includes the Launch Service, which helps developers get up and running quickly in the cloud through a number of ready-to-run examples — or missions — that streamline developer productivity.

New Cache Booster with JBoss Data Grid integration

In our latest continuous delivery release, we have added a new cache mission  that demonstrates how to use a cache to increase the response time of applications.  This mission shows you how to:

  1. Deploy a cache to OpenShift.
  2. Use a cache within an application.

The common use case for this booster is to cache service result sets to decrease latency associated with data access as well as reduce workload on backend service.  Another very common use case is to reduce the data volume of message send across in distributed system.

Using developers.redhat.com/launch, you can immediately create and deploy an application with cache and many other boosters directly to OpenShift Online or to your own local OpenShift cluster.

You can find more details on Getting Started with Application Development on OpenShift.

 

Improved Reactive and IoT support in Vert.x

A number of tech trends have contributed to the current rise of reactive programming, most notably IoT and Mobile. The increasing growth of IoT and Mobile means the server side has to handle millions of connected devices concurrently, a task best handled by asynchronous processing due to its lightweight ability to represent resources such as “the device” or whatever it might be. As such, we are adding the new Vert.x 3.5.1 release to the supported runtimes to address the market need of better reactive support for responsive apps and IoT.  The new enhancement in Vert.x are:

  1. Improved reactive support
    1. RxJava 2 support
    2. SockJS Service Proxy
    3. Event-driven JSON parsing
  2. Improved enterprise and device connectivity for IoT development
    1. vertx-proton - AMQ Client
    2. gRPC
    3. Hashicorp Vault support (Tech Preview)
    4. MongoDB Support with MongoDB client
    5. MQTT module (client and server)
    6. Kafka client, Prometheus client
  3. Improved OpenShift
    1. SupportEvent Bus on OpenShift
    2. Launch Cache Mission on OpenShift

 

Improved Standards support for Java Microservices in WildFly Swarm

WildFly Swarm is a Java Microservices runtime and framework included in the RHOAR subscription that enables organizations to leverage their Java EE knowledge when moving to cloud native development. It does so by re-thinking the execution environment - containerized applications in an orchestrated (Kubernetes) environment.  Many of the management features typically offered by application servers are now provided by containerized environments. WildFly Swarm replaces traditional app server features and instead exposes features and capabilities that enable the container environment to more easily manage and monitor applications.

WildFly Swarm supports both Uber jars and traditional war file deployments. The uber-jar approach includes both application and just enough of the app server to run the application. This is ideal for organizations that prefer a self-contained distributed executable. Traditional war file deployments are for those that prefer to optimize for containerized environments.  The new enhancements in WildFly Swarm 7.1 (GA late May 2018) are:

  • Based on JBoss EAP 7.1
  • Adds MicroProfile 1.2 support
  • Adds MicroProfile hollow jar support

To learn more about various application assembly strategies, see The Skinny on Fat, Thin, Hollow, and Uber JARS.

 

At the Red Hat Summit: Istio + OpenShift Application Runtimes

We will be introducing a Developer Preview of OpenShift Istio Service Mesh integration with Spring Boot and WildFly Swarm.  Traditionally distributed microservices architecture based application development and management is pretty complex, requiring lots of custom code like circuit-breaking, load-balancing, and health-check to be included within your microservices.  By integrating RHOAR runtimes with OpenShift and Istio, Red Hat offers an unified platform to develop and integrate microservices, improve security, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies, and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying container management platform, such as Kubernetes.

To get hands-on experience and learn more, attend following workshop and sessions:

 

Node.js

Node.js is a recent supported addition to OpenShift Application Runtimes, and is a server-side Javascript runtime that Red Hat is optimizing for use on Kubernetes. Recent enhancements include:

Red Hat is active in the Node.js community as a Silver Member of the Node Foundation, with multiple Node.js core committers, including a member of the technical steering committee.

 

Spring Boot

Spring Boot in OpenShift Application Runtimes is being optimized for Kubernetes, in part by the Spring Cloud Kubernetes project that was donated to the Spring Cloud community by Red Hat.  Also new to Spring Boot in OpenShift Application Runtimes is:

  • Updated to Spring Boot 1.5.12
  • New Launch Cache Mission example
  • Istio Mission support in the Istio Developer Preview

 

Get Engaged

The RHOAR team is continually taking feedback from customers and the wider community of open source developers.  To post a tagged a question, go to Stack Overflow to post your question. Make sure to use the redhat-rhoar in the Tags field.

 

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