Red Hat this week announced a rearchitected OpenShift at its Summit conference, with version 4 bringing a cloud-like experience. The company said it will be generally available next month.

The release also includes Operator Hub, which makes the concept of operators a first-class citizen in the platform update, according to Brian Micklea, who runs the developer business unit at Red Hat. The hub was created by Red Hat, AWS, Azure and Google as the community place to store their operators and make them available to the community.

“We think the platform, the development experience, the way to onboard applications is pretty good, and continues to get better, but we really had to revamp the entire operational experience. It was too complicated for customers to get up and running; it was too tough for them to maintain because new releases were coming out every quarter,” Micklea told SD Times, explaining the reasons behind the rearchitected platform. “There was just this overall sense of, if people are basing their experiences on what the public cloud is like, ease of setup, don’t have to maintain much and scale it easily, you have to embed that in the platform.”

The operator framework was rolled out last May to enable organizations to bring stateful applications into Kubernetes by managing application maintenance, failover and scaling. Micklea said when operators were introduced, the community wanted this to be a de facto way they ship their software going forward. “For us, the operator framework — the Operator Hub — opens a lot of doors in terms of people feeling confident about running Big Data or AI workloads.”

Further, Red Hat has created a Certified Operator program, for enterprises that require a known support path and certifies the companies behind the operator are working together for a deeper level of integration, he said.

Among other new features in 4.0 are OpenShift Service Mesh that is based on Istio but natively integrates on the operations side with Prometheus for monitoring and Grafana for dashboards, and on the developer side with Jaeger for native tracing and Kiali for visualizing what microservices are in the service mesh and how they are connected, Micklea said.

Red Hat is going into beta with serverless technology on the platform, specifically Knative, which provides the plumbing that makes serverless work. Micklea said the company is partnering with frameworks on top of Knative so they can have consistency of experience between what they do on-premises and in the cloud.

CodeReady Workspaces, announced in GA in March, is for customers who want a well-defined developer experience. “Customers have said, ‘We want to provide the developer with the IDE, and on the back end we want to wire that in so they can write their code, commit their code, and not have to care about any of the details,’ like where the source code lives, or CI pipelines,” Micklea said. “It’s all just available to them.”