New features and enhancements

This feature is now fully supported in OpenShift v4.

The OLM aids cluster administrators in installing, upgrading, and granting access to Operators running on their cluster:

See Understanding the Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) for more information.

OperatorHub is available to administrators and helps with easy discovery and installation of all optional components and applications. It includes offerings from Red Hat products, Red Hat partners, and the community.

See Understanding the OperatorHub for more information.

Updated guidance around Cluster maximums for OpenShift v4 is now available.

Use the OKD Limit Calculator to estimate cluster limits for your environment.

The Node Tuning Operator is now part of a standard OKD installation in OpenShift v4.

The Node Tuning Operator helps you manage node-level tuning by orchestrating the tuned daemon. The majority of high-performance applications require some level of kernel tuning. The Node Tuning Operator provides a unified management interface to users of node-level sysctls and more flexibility to add custom tuning, which is currently a Technology Preview feature, specified by user needs. The Operator manages the containerized tuned daemon for OpenShift Container Platform as a Kubernetes DaemonSet. It ensures the custom tuning specification is passed to all containerized tuned daemons running in the cluster in the format that the daemons understand. The daemons run on all nodes in the cluster, one per node.

This feature, currently in Technology Preview, enables you to configure horizontal pod autoscaling (HPA) based on the custom metrics API. As part of this Technology Preview, a Prometheus Adapter component can be deployed to provide any app metrics for the custom metrics API.

Limitations:

An alerting UI is now natively integrated into the OKD web console. You can now view cluster-level alerts and alerting rules from a single place, as well as configure silences.

Telemeter collects anonymized cluster-related metrics to proactively help customers with their OKD clusters. This helps:

By default, OpenShift Cluster Monitoring exposes CPU and Memory utilization through the Kubernetes resource metrics API. There is no longer a requirement to install a separate metrics server.

Multi-stage Dockerfiles are now supported in all Docker strategy builds.

The registry is now managed by an Operator instead of oc adm registry.

The cluster network is now configured and managed by an Operator. The Operator upgrades and monitors the cluster network.

The default mode is now NetworkPolicy.

Multus is a meta plug-in for Kubernetes Container Network Interface (CNI), which enables a user to create multiple network interfaces per pod.

OpenShift v4 includes the Technical Preview capability to use specific SR-IOV hardware on OKD nodes, which enables the user to attach SR-IOV virtual function (VF) interfaces to Pods in addition to other network interfaces.

F5 router plug-in is no longer supported as part of OKD directly. However, F5 has developed a container connector that replaces the functionality. It is recommended to work with F5 support to implement their solution.

OpenShift v4 features a redesigned Developer Catalog that brings all of the new Operators and existing broker services together, with new ways to discover, sort, and understand how to best use each type of offering. The Developer Catalog is the entry point for a developer to access all services available to them. It merges all capabilities from Operators, the Service Catalog, brokers, and Source-to-Image (S2I).

New management screens in OpenShift v4 support automated operations. Examples include the management of machine sets and machines, taints, tolerations, and cluster settings.