What a great week for the partner ecosystem! We got the ball rolling with the monumental announcement of our partnership with Microsoft, followed it up with passing over 150 members in OpenShift Commons, and yesterday we announced OpenShift Enterprise 3.1. Ever since our decision to adopt the docker container format for our platform, the OpenShift Ecosystem has never been more vibrant. As a result, this is the first blog in what will become a series of blogs over the coming weeks and months showcasing our partners and the work they are doing to extend and complement the capabilities of OpenShift.

For this inaugural post, the focus is on partners that are helping to improve the developer experience for on-boarding applications to OpenShift -- specifically, Codenvy and Click2Cloud. Both of these companies have been working closely with the OpenShift community and partner teams to deliver fantastic IDE options for developers looking to get their applications running on OpenShift. Let's take a closer look at each, starting with Codenvy and their work with Eclipse Che.

Codenvy

Eclipse Che is the next generation docker-based IDE platform from the Eclipse Foundation. It enables developers to work across multiple platforms and languages. As Codenvy CEO, Tyler Jewel, shared with me,
" Projects [in the Che world], when imported into Che, inherit from a customizable stack of software that installs services a developer needs: intellisense, compiler, analyzer, debugger, and editor."
It is adding these needed development features where Codenvy and OpenShift are collaborating within the community to provide Che plug-ins for OpenShift. Some key features of the plugin include:
  • The ability to quickly edit, debug and link services that make up your application
  • The option for developers to import, create and update OpenShift projects from within the IDE
  • Driving CI/CD pipelines from development to production
Currently, a beta of the new version of Che with the OpenShift plugin is scheduled to be available before the end of the year. In the interim, check out this video of the work to date:

Click2Cloud

As both a Red Hat and Microsoft partner, Click2Cloud has been working with OpenShift technology for quite some time, but it's their Visual Studio (VS) integration that really shines in light of last week's announcement. In many Microsoft-centric shops, VS is the preferred IDE, and OpenShift can be used by those customers thanks to this work. The integration allows OpenShift to be a target platform for deployments in VS, including bridging work done in Team Foundation Server (TFS) to OpenShift. Some more recent areas of focus for the Click2Cloud team as OpenShift has evolved:

  • Blue/Green deployment support allowing roll-outs to be driven from VS
  • Log aggregation in VS studio for all container logs and project events
  • Ensuring the plugin works with various VS Commercial and Community Editions

The Click2Cloud team also has an early version of their plugin available, you can check it out here:

Parting Thoughts

While not the only IDE choices out there, it is exciting to see these two partners who work with a couple of the most used IDEs, really latch onto what Red Hat is building for the next generation developer platform. A key element that both of these solutions are developing is the ability to build and iterate locally before pushing to your OpenShift environment, which speeds your development time by minimizing build/deploy cycles. For the OpenShift team, we are not only looking to provide choice for our customers, but we also want to provide consistency. Whether you use VS or Eclipse, your experience in working with OpenShift should be the same -- the only differences should be related to how each tool works. This is a key driver for us as we march forward.

Categories

News, OpenShift Container Platform, How-tos

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