Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has announced the general availability of Red Hat Developer Hub, an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) aimed at enterprises and based on Backstage, an open-source project from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). With a self-service portal, standardized software templates, dynamic plug-in management, enterprise role-based access control (RBAC), and premium support, Red Hat Developer Hub provides tools and capabilities to address DevOps bottlenecks and tackle issues such as complexity, lack of standardization, and cognitive load.
Red Hat Developer Hub enables teams to accelerate development and deployment on any platform with more consistent and standardized pipelines. For organizations seeking to standardize operations across the open hybrid cloud, Developer Hub is fully integrated with Red Hat OpenShift to leverage technological innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud-native application architectures.
The Key to Accelerating and Scaling Application Development: Optimizing Complexity
According to the IDC, we are living in the era of the digital business. It predicts that “technology spending by organizations will grow 7 times faster than the economy in 2024, as companies are compelled to develop digital business models and reinforce digital capabilities to respond to market needs.”
The accelerated pace demanded by doing business and competing in a digital economy has increased pressure to create new sources of value through digital products, services, and experiences. However, this new way of doing business has come at a cost for organizational IT departments, which are now facing significant technical debt, skills gaps, architectural limitations, and security risks due to the increasing complexity of IT and lack of standardization in the development toolchain.
Accelerating Onboarding and Software Delivery Time with a Unified Portal and Standardized Software Templates
Red Hat Developer Hub addresses these challenges with a self-service portal that brings together all the information developers need, including access to multiple consoles, a unified software catalog, and updated documentation within the same repository. This environment is not only easier to manage for teams, but new members can more easily find what they need as they familiarize themselves with the tools and processes, making them more productive more quickly.
Standardized software templates further streamline the onboarding of applications and developers by abstracting auxiliary tasks and technological details that can slow down the development and delivery process. With the click of a button, developers can access everything they need—best practices and pre-architected components by the platform’s engineering teams—automatically created and ready to start building and delivering applications immediately.
A Customized and Enhanced Development Environment with Technological Plug-ins
Red Hat Developer Hub features the same plug-in architecture as the Backstage project, allowing users to integrate new capabilities into their development toolchain. With the new dynamic plug-in management capabilities of Red Hat Developer Hub, users can install, update, and remove plug-ins quickly and easily without having to plan downtime to modify the source code and rebuild and redeploy the base Backstage environment.
Red Hat has developed a series of technological plug-ins based on user feedback and has incorporated them into the Backstage community. These plug-ins are supported and verified for use with Red Hat Developer Hub, mitigating potential compatibility risks and operational issues. Additionally, Red Hat Developer Hub is fully capable of running and accommodating community plug-ins, providing organizations with greater control and flexibility over their environments.
Integrating Security from the Early Stages of Software Development for Greater Resilience
Software security is more than code. It includes people, processes, and tools. Building trust and transparency throughout the software development lifecycle requires prioritizing the adoption of security measures in each of these areas from the outset.
Red Hat Developer Hub simplifies and standardizes user management with role-based access control (RBAC) through a new available plug-in. The RBAC plug-in offers administrators and project managers the ability to manage user access to the portal based on their role within a team. The plug-in can connect to the organization’s authentication provider and be assigned to custom workflow roles, allowing users to obtain the appropriate permissions for the software catalog and associated data.
Red Hat Developer Hub also complements and integrates with Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain, a software supply chain security solution that provides an opinion-based framework for managing trusted content at code-time, with an automated trust chain that can verify pipeline compliance at build time. These tools provide information about the origin and certification of the languages, frameworks, and dependencies used in the Red Hat Developer Hub portal, and offer platform engineers the ability to respond more quickly with updates based on security and compliance needs.
Red Hat Trusted Application Pipelines, Red Hat Trusted Profile Analyzer, and Red Hat Trusted Artifact Signer are currently available in technology preview, with general availability expected by the end of this quarter.
In conclusion, Red Hat Developer Hub is a comprehensive platform that addresses the complexities and challenges faced by enterprise developers, providing a unified, standardized, and secure environment for accelerating application development and deployment. With its robust set of tools and integrations, organizations can streamline their development processes and deliver innovative solutions on a global scale.