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Red Hat is boosting its application development efforts with a pair of new releases, including Fuse 7 and Buildah 1.0, that will help developers to build and integrate cloud native container applications.
Red Hat Fuse 7 is a cloud-native integration platform that is being augmented with a new hosted low code integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) called Fuse Online. The Buildah 1.0 release is a new open-source project that enables developers to build container application images.
“Buildah is a utility that is focused on the creation of container images that are OCI (Open Container Initiative) compliant, following the OCI Image Specification 1.0,” Ben Breard, senior technology product manager for Linux Containers at Red Hat, told eWEEK. “In this way it’s more akin to the docker build command and the differences lie in the fact that docker build requires both a daemon and a running container.”.
Breard explained that Buildah does not use a daemon and does not require a running container, except for the buildah run command, which allows for more more flexibility around how an image is created. He added that Buildah is not a replacement for the Docker Compose utility either, which is a tool for defining and running multi-container applications.
Building Images with Buildah
William Henry, senior consulting engineer for DevOps Strategy at Red Hat explained that Buildah provides multiple paths to create container images. With the Docker approach to container building there is a text file known as a Dockerfile, which includes instructions on how to build a given application image. Henry said that developers can use Buildah in the same way as dockerfile.
“Users who like the Dockerfile format can continue to use that workflow with Buildah, as you can simply point Buildah at the Dockerfile and it will take care of everything,” Henry told eWEEK. “Where Buildah shines is that it overcomes some of the traditional shortcomings of the Dockerfile format and can use the container host’s tools to modify the image content, rather than relying on what’s in the image.”
Breard commented that Buildah is currently included and supported in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, beginning with the recently-launched version 7.5. He added that Buildah will also likely play an important role in future versions of Red Hat OpenShift, which is Red Hat’s enterprise distribution of Kubernetes for container orchestration. Looking forward, Daniel Walsh, consulting software engineer at Red Hat, said that as a community project, Buildah will be in large part driven by end user demands and the community.
“We’re also focusing on integrating Buildah with OpenShift, as we see a lot of potential around user namespaces and bringing enhancements to the caching model,” Walsh told eWEEK.
Fuse
The Red Hat Fuse 7 release is the latest update of Red Hat’s code integration platform that was originally known as JBoss Fuse. There are multiple upstream open-source projects that help to enable Red Hat Fuse, with the Apache Camel project being the core component.
As part of the Fuse 7 release, Red Hat is launching a new Fuse Online platform that enables developers to deploy cloud-native integrations with a hosted service. Sameer Parulkar, senior product marketing manager at Red Parulkar said that Fuse runs natively on OpenShift and developers can use the tools and capabilities available with Red Hat Fuse to develop container-native integrated apps or APIs for OpenShift.
“Fuse 7 allows for more agile integration development, as it creates an integration platform that spans multiple environments while still being lightweight and decentralized,” Parulkar told eWEEK.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.