Red Hat Developer Hub: An Enterprise-Ready IDP

It took some time, but Red Hat has released its internal developer platform, Red Hat Developer Hub.

In the last few years, Internal Developer Platforms (IDP), which consists of tools and technologies to help developer teams and DevOps create and deploy code, has picked up speed. So it only made sense for Red Hat, with its Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Kubernetes (OpenShift), and infrastructure as code. (IaC) program (Ansible) stack to build its own opinionated IDP, Red Hat Developer Hub.

Based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation‘s (CNCF) open source Backstage, Developer Hub provides a suite of tools and features to streamline and enhance the development process. Why? Because, as Balaji Sivasubramanian, Red Hat’s senior director of developer tools product management, explained, “We realized that people are looking to improve productivity and engineering. IDPs provide a central portal for enterprise developers to use. This streamlines the workload for developers in that all the tools they use to build an application are available in a central catalog. This saves time for system administrators and the engineering staff, as it limits the number of tools they can support.

So, this new Developer Hub is designed to tackle common DevOps challenges, including complexity, lack of standardization, and cognitive overload. It features a self-service portal, standardized software templates, and plug-in management, all underpinned by enterprise role-based access control (RBAC) and robust support systems. This comprehensive approach aims to accelerate development and deployment across various platforms, ensuring more consistent and standardized pipelines.

A key aspect of the Developer Hub is its full integration with OpenShift, which opens doors to innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud native application architectures. This integration is crucial for organizations aiming to standardize operations across the open hybrid cloud.

The digital business era is intensifying the pressure on companies to innovate and create value through digital products, services, and experiences. Red Hat’s Developer Hub addresses this need by providing a unified portal and standardized software templates. These features simplify onboarding, reduce the time-to-deliver software, and abstract ancillary tasks and technology details that often slow down development.

The platform also boasts a Backstage-style plug-in architecture. This enables users to integrate new capabilities into their development toolchain seamlessly. Red Hat has contributed several technology plug-ins. This includes plug-ins allowing users to incorporate the Azure Container Registry, JFrog Artifactory (repository), Kiali (Istio observability console), Nexis (repository manager), and 3scale (API managements) into their IDP pipelines. Furthermore, the platform supports community plug-ins, offering organizations greater control and flexibility.

Security in IDPs

Security is a paramount concern in software development, and the Red Hat Developer Hub addresses this through its role-based access control (RBAC) system. This system simplifies user management and aligns with the organization’s authentication provider, ensuring appropriate permissions and security measures.

Complementing the Developer Hub is the Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain, a security solution that provides a framework for curating trusted content and verifying pipeline compliance. This integration ensures provenance and attestation for languages, frameworks, and dependencies used in the Developer Hub portal.

In addition, other complementary programs, such as Red Hat Trusted Application Pipelines, Red Hat Trusted Profile Analyzer, and Red Hat Trusted Artifact Signer, are currently available in technology previews. These should reach general availability later this quarter.

The Red Hat Developer Hub, itself, is now generally available with full support, marking a significant step forward in cloud development. For more information and to access the platform, visit Red Hat Developer Hub.

Of course, you should also be aware that Red Hat’s not the only one building IDPs around Backstage. Humanitec and VMware have also built enterprise Backstage platforms.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, aka sjvn, has been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was the cutting-edge PC operating system, 300bps was a fast internet connection, WordStar was the state-of-the-art word processor, and we liked it.

Read more from Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols