Red Hat unveils Developer Hub to streamline enterprise development

Open source solutions provider Red Hat has announced the general availability of the Red Hat Developer Hub, an enterprise-grade Internal Developer Platform (IDP) based on the open-source project, Backstage, from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

According to Red Hat, the new platform aims to accelerate development to production through increased productivity and collaboration, reducing cognitive burdens on engineering teams.

As organisations increase their spending on digital technology - a figure expected to rise by 7% in 2024 - IT complexity and lack of standardisation in development tools triggered by the need for innovation are creating challenges for IT departments. These include technical debt, skills shortages, architectural limitations and security threats. Red Hat says its Developer Hub offers a solution to these challenges through a self-service portal which brings together necessary information for developers.

The Red Hat Developer Hub features include standardised software templates for streamlining application and developer onboarding by abstracting non-core tasks and technology details. This aims to streamline the development and delivery processes. The developer hub also offers dynamic plug-in management capabilities. This lets users swiftly and conveniently install, update and remove plug-ins without having to schedule downtime to modify source code, and rebuild and redeploy the Backstage environment.

Another key feature is the move to 'shift security left' for more resilient development lifecycles. This is achieved by simplifying and standardising user management using role-based access control (RBAC) through a new plug-in in the Developer Hub. This feature ensures a more consistent and standardised pipeline for development and deployment across platforms. The Developer Hub is fully integrated with Red Hat OpenShift, unlocking innovations like artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud-native application architectures.

Red Hat's Balaji Sivasubramanian, senior director, Developer Tools Product Management, said, "Red Hat Developer Hub enables organisations to fast-track the adoption of IDPs and scale them across the enterprise in a flexible, more secure and fully supported manner."

Lara Greden, research director for Cloud Platforms at IDC, added, "Red Hat Developer Hub takes the heavy lifting off of these teams and gives them the tools that support the collective DevOps effort so that developers can focus on writing code and delivering a competitive advantage for their organisations."

Robert Bauer, product manager at Bundesrechenzentrum GmbH, confirmed the importance of developer efficiency and productivity, and expressed confidence that "the launch of Red Hat Developer Hub will help fill the need for a fully supported, enterprise-grade distribution of the project."