Red Hat Developer Hub aims to help developers build better apps faster

Red Hat has unveiled its Red Hat Developer Hub as a fully-fledged portal to ‘supercharge’ the developer experience.

The product is a former open source project from Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), called Backstage.io, and is now the first standalone, enterprise-grade version of it.

Red Hat Developer Hub, according to the open source software firm, unifies and standardizes the developer experience, maximizes productivity, and enables individuals and organizations to make the most of existing investments and skill sets. 

The new portal - unveiled at this week’s Red Hat Summit in Boston - is unified and open, and essentially offers developers an internally curated and managed toolset to ensure they can quickly and easily turn their software visions into successful reality.

It’s all about maximizing what enterprises have already invested in at a knowledge and financial level as well as increasing velocity and reducing friction, the company claimed. 

“Red Hat Developer Hub adds support for key Red Hat developer plug-ins to drive a more consistent user experience without compromising on that application velocity. The platform also contains validated templates," said Chris Wright, CTO at Red Hat.

"These provide opinionated, pre-architected approaches to building and deploying software from creation to production.

“Developer Hub gives IT organizations a developer platform built on open source innovation with that stability, that support, that reliability that you’ve come to expect from our hybrid cloud technologies. Developer Hub also builds on skills that  IT organizations have already through integration with Red Hat OpenShift.

“That’s the best news. It’s building on skills and technologies that you already have. This maximizes what you know without having to sacrifice application innovation to maintain operations.”

Wright also cited Salesforce’s 2022 ‘Great Resignation’ research, which revealed the majority (76%) of firms feel the cognitive load needed to get to grips with new software architectures is just too high. 

As a result, productivity and sense of achievement decrease rather than increase. 

Developer Hub aims to redress the balance here, according to Wright. 

“As IT resources grow ever more scant and demand for new applications just keeps growing, these platforms grow more daunting. If these platforms aren’t maintained at the speed of development, then CIOs can look forward to fragmentation, complexity, and worse. The use of unverified code that can find its way into production…

“Adding a net new platform all but guarantees a  new learning curve, which equates to hours lost in training that you really don’t have.” 

With a view to removing barriers and accelerating innovation and results-driven performance, the Red Hat Developer Hub:

• Offers a single view of all the tools and resources available for developers as they look to boost productivity.
• Enables users to self-serve and ensure best practice across the board.  
• Maintains the proper levels of security and governance. 

Wright said that the focus was on taking “differentiated applications to market as quickly and as painlessly as you can".

What’s more, Wright acknowledged the unsung IT heroes outside of the developer world, saying it was those people that kept “developer workflows rolling smoothly, with the right tools, the validated environments, and on-demand services".

Ultimately, Developer Hub should free up developer bandwidth in a number of ways. 

“This helps developers focus on crafting beautiful code and not the plumbing underneath,” Wright added.