Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and GitHub, the software collaboration platform home to more than 50 million developers, today announced extended collaboration between the two companies, emphasizing Red Hat OpenShift through GitHub Actions and more. Red Hat is adding Red Hat GitHub Actions to the GitHub Marketplace, bringing GitHub’s DevOps, continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) and developer workflow automation tools to Red Hat OpenShift. This further refines the application development capabilities of the world’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform with GitHub Actions, adding greater freedom to how developers can build and deploy applications on Red Hat OpenShift across the open hybrid cloud.

GitHub has become nearly synonymous with developer tools and serves as the home for many popular software projects, including open source communities like the Linux kernel and Kubernetes. Using GitHub’s built-in powerful, flexible CI/CD solution, GitHub Actions puts automation directly in the developer path, making it possible for nearly any event in a GitHub repository, like a pull-request or issue comment, to trigger workflows that can build and deploy applications across an IT environment and automate nearly any process in the software lifecycle. Organizations often want to bring the familiar, collaborative experience of GitHub to their developers, as well as provide a more secure, common platform for working with open source communities. This makes the availability of tooling like Actions on enterprise Kubernetes platforms a crucial component for the future of IT.

Red Hat OpenShift now supports GitHub Actions, enabling organizations to standardize and scale their use of open, standardized developer toolchain components like Quay, Buildah, or Source-to-Image (s2i). This helps to meet developers where they are and provides greater choice and flexibility to OpenShift customers in how they build and deploy applications. The new GitHub Actions for Red Hat OpenShift, along with existing actions on GitHub Marketplace and action workflows, make it possible to achieve simple as well as complex application workflows on Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform using an extensive array of standards-based tools.

As part of the collaboration, GitHub has also joined OpenShift Commons, a community that helps drive connections and collaboration across the OpenShift ecosystem. Beyond Actions and GitHub Marketplace, Red Hat and GitHub are also exploring self-hosted GitHub runners for OpenShift. A runner is the combined application and server that hosts a job and carries out the steps for an Action workflow. Self-hosting runners gives IT teams more control and flexibility over the hardware and software included as part of their environment. This means that end users can increase memory size, enable GPUs, or install software that may only be available locally as part of a tailored application development experience.

The addition of GitHub Actions builds on Red Hat OpenShift’s robust developer experience, which includes OpenShift GitOps (based on ArgoCD) and OpenShift Pipelines (based on Tekton). OpenShift is now able to provide a complete solution for DevOps and GitOps practitioners as they seek to build, deploy, and maintain cloud-native applications.

Availability

GitHub Actions on Red Hat OpenShift are available now via GitHub Marketplace.

Supporting Quotes

Joe Fernandes, vice president, Products, Cloud Platforms, Red Hat

“Red Hat OpenShift is more than a Kubernetes platform for deploying cloud-native applications; it’s a powerful, flexible foundation for developers to build the latest and greatest applications. By adding GitHub Actions to our existing set of DevOps and GitOps capabilities and by working with GitHub to further refine and expand the developer experience, we aim to make Red Hat OpenShift the most complete cloud-native development platform available, one built on the open standards of Kubernetes and Linux containers and backed by the vast expertise of Red Hat.”

Jeremy Epling, vice president of Product Management, GitHub

“GitHub is the home for all developers, and we’re excited to expand our collaboration with Red Hat to accelerate software development within the enterprise. Combining Red Hat OpenShift with GitHub Actions will help our customers more securely automate nearly all their cloud-native development and DevOps workflows, providing a unified experience across the hybrid cloud that is exceptionally friendly to developers, security and operations teams. We’re looking forward to working more closely with Red Hat, and helping our customers deliver better and faster with open source software and standards.”

Overview

At Black Hat 2019 in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced a set of security enhancements for Azure Files focused on tightening access control. The updates center on Azure Active Directory Domain Services (Azure AD DS) authentication for Server Message Block (SMB) access, NTFS discretionary access control list (DACL) enforcement, new built-in RBAC roles, and a more accessible permission management experience through File Explorer.

Azure AD DS Authentication for SMB Access

The headline feature is Azure AD DS authentication support for SMB access to Azure Files. Domain-joined Windows virtual machines can now mount and access Azure file shares over SMB using AD DS credentials, with NTFS access control lists (ACLs) enforced at the file and folder level.

This makes Azure Files a stronger option for enterprise lift-and-shift scenarios. Because the permission assignment and enforcement model mirrors standard NTFS behavior, migrating an on-premises SMB file server workload to Azure Files requires minimal changes to access control configuration. Administrators can use the same mental model and tooling they already know.

Microsoft specifically called out Windows Virtual Desktop as a key use case: it recommends Azure Files for hosting user profiles, leveraging Azure AD DS authentication for access control.

Granular Permissions: Share, File, and Folder Level

Azure AD DS authentication for Azure Files enables granular permission assignments at the share, file, and folder levels. This unblocks common enterprise scenarios such as:

• Single writer, multi-reader: Line-of-business applications that require one principal to write while multiple others read from the same share.
• Shared storage for cloud-based services: Azure Files becomes a viable shared storage backend for cloud-native or migrated workloads that previously depended on on-premises SMB shares.

NTFS DACL Enforcement and Preservation

Azure Files now strictly enforces NTFS Discretionary Access Control Lists (DACLs). A key operational benefit is that these DACLs are preserved across data movement and recovery workflows:

• Data migration with Robocopy: Because Azure Files enforces NTFS DACLs, tools like Robocopy can move data into an Azure file share while persisting all security controls — no manual ACL re-application required after migration.
• Snapshots and backup: Azure Files access control lists are captured in file share snapshots. This means services like Azure Backup, which leverages file snapshots, preserve ACLs through backup and disaster recovery operations.

Three New Built-In RBAC Roles for Share-Level Access

To simplify share-level access management, Microsoft introduced three new built-in Azure RBAC roles specifically for Azure Files SMB access:

These built-in roles remove the need to create custom roles for standard share-level permission patterns, reducing administrative overhead and the risk of misconfiguration.

Permission Management Through File Explorer

Previously, viewing and modifying permissions on Azure Files required the Windows command-line tool icacls. While functional, icacls is not easily discoverable, and its usage is inconsistent with how most users expect to manage file permissions on Windows.

This capability was first previewed at Microsoft Ignite 2018. With this update, permission management is now available directly through File Explorer, bringing the experience in line with standard Windows file permission workflows. Administrators and end users familiar with the Windows Security tab can now assign and modify Azure Files permissions without dropping to a command line.

Planned Extension to On-Premises Windows Server Active Directory

At the time of announcement, Azure AD DS authentication was the supported identity source for Azure Files SMB access control. However, Microsoft stated that the Azure Files team was actively working to extend authentication support to Windows Server Active Directory hosted on-premises or in the cloud.

This planned extension is important for organizations that have not yet moved their identity infrastructure to Azure AD DS and rely on traditional on-premises AD for authentication. It signals Microsoft’s intent to make Azure Files a drop-in replacement for on-premises SMB file servers regardless of the identity topology in use.

Summary of Key Improvements

• Azure AD DS authentication for SMB access to Azure Files, with enforced NTFS ACLs
• Granular share-, file-, and folder-level permission control
• NTFS DACL preservation during Robocopy migrations and Azure Backup snapshot-based recovery
• Three new built-in RBAC roles (Reader, Contributor, Elevated Contributor) for share-level access management
• File Explorer support for permission assignment, replacing the command-line-only icacls approach
• Planned support for on-premises Windows Server Active Directory authentication

Together, these changes make Azure Files a significantly more viable enterprise storage platform for organizations migrating SMB workloads to Azure, particularly where maintaining existing access control structures and familiar management tooling is a requirement.