Originally announced in October 2019, Red Hat OpenShift 4.2 represented a significant step forward in Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform, focusing on reducing friction for developers working with cloud-native applications across hybrid cloud environments. This release expanded automated cluster management, added ready-to-use developer services, and introduced local development tooling to bring OpenShift closer to day-to-day developer workflows.
Empowering Developer Innovation on Kubernetes
A recurring challenge with enterprise Kubernetes is the steep operational learning curve that can slow down application developers. OpenShift 4.2 addressed this directly by automating cluster setup and management tasks, allowing developers to focus on writing application code rather than managing Kubernetes infrastructure. The release also bundled a set of ready-to-use developer services covering the most common cloud-native concerns: service mesh, serverless compute, and CI/CD pipelines.
OpenShift Service Mesh
Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh, based on the upstream Istio, Kiali, and Jaeger open source projects, became available in this release. Delivered and managed via Kubernetes Operators, it is designed to simplify the development, deployment, and observability of microservices-based applications running on OpenShift. Istio handles traffic management and mutual TLS, Kiali provides a visual topology of the mesh, and Jaeger enables distributed tracing across services.
OpenShift Serverless (Technology Preview)
Built on the Knative project, OpenShift Serverless was introduced as a Technology Preview in 4.2. It allows workloads to scale down to zero replicas when idle and scale up on demand in response to incoming requests. This model can reduce infrastructure costs for workloads with variable or unpredictable traffic patterns while keeping applications responsive.
OpenShift Pipelines (Developer Preview)
OpenShift Pipelines, available as a Developer Preview and delivered as a Kubernetes Operator, brought a cloud-native CI/CD approach based on the Tekton project. Each step of a pipeline runs in its own isolated container, which means individual steps can be versioned, reused, and scaled independently. This is a meaningful architectural difference from traditional CI/CD systems that run pipeline steps in a shared agent environment.
Local Development with Red Hat CodeReady Containers
One of the most developer-facing additions in OpenShift 4.2 was Red Hat CodeReady Containers (CRC). CRC lets developers install a minimal, pre-configured OpenShift cluster on a local laptop or workstation. This provides a self-contained environment that mirrors a full OpenShift cluster closely enough to develop and test cloud-native applications locally before deploying to a production cluster.
Previously, iterating on OpenShift-specific features—such as Operator-managed services or OpenShift-specific build configurations—required access to a remote cluster. CodeReady Containers lowered that barrier significantly by bringing the cluster to the developer’s machine.
Hybrid Cloud Consistency and Simplified Operations
Beyond developer tooling, OpenShift 4.2 included several platform-level improvements aimed at consistent operations across cloud and on-premises environments.
- Multi-cloud installation: Simplified, automated installation across major public cloud providers including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), as well as private clouds based on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, with a consistent enterprise experience across all targets.
- OpenShift 3 to 4 migration tooling: Red Hat introduced migration tooling to help existing OpenShift 3 customers move workloads to OpenShift 4 clusters. The tooling was designed to automate copying workloads between clusters, reducing the manual effort involved in a major platform upgrade.
- Container Storage Interface (CSI) drivers: OpenShift 4.2 added CSI driver support, giving third-party storage vendors a standardized way to integrate with the Kubernetes storage ecosystem. The release also included support for OpenShift Container Storage 4, which was in beta at the time of this announcement.
Summary
OpenShift 4.2 marked a deliberate shift toward making enterprise Kubernetes more accessible to application developers, not just platform operators. The combination of CodeReady Containers for local development, Operator-delivered services for service mesh, serverless, and pipelines, and cross-cloud installation automation reflected Red Hat’s strategy of reducing the gap between developer intent and production Kubernetes deployments. Organisations still running OpenShift 3 at the time of this release had a clear migration path to evaluate.
This article is based on Red Hat’s October 2019 announcement of OpenShift 4.2. Feature availability statuses (GA, Technology Preview, Developer Preview) reflect the state at the time of that release and will have changed in subsequent versions.