Red Hat pushes open source cloud with OpenStack distro

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Linux software giant Red Hat has launched a community-led distribution of the OpenStack open source cloud platform.

RDO — announced at the OpenStack Summit in Portland, USA, on Monday — is a free community-supported distro of OpenStack that will run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Fedora and their derivatives.

OpenStack is an assortment of open source software designed to offer on-demand compute, storage and networking services, often referred to as infrastructure as a service.

"OpenStack represents an ideal example of community-powered innovation in the cloud," said Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens in a statement on Monday.

"We support the OpenStack ecosystem through software development and community engagement and are excited to continue advancing these technologies with the community through RDO and for our enterprise customers with advancements with our Red Hat OpenStack distribution."

RDO incorporates the fundamental OpenStack components, which includes Nova, Glance, Keystone, Cinder, Quantum, Swift and Horizon.

Red Hat has tried to simplify the installation process with the Red Hat-developed installation tool, PackStack.

The organisation also released a preview of its subscription-based enterprise edition of OpenStack for those who sign up to the enterprise edition's early adopter program. The commercially available offering will launch this summer.

"As open source projects mature, one of the key factors in their wider adoption becomes packaging. With its RDO distribution, Red Hat is clearly looking to streamline the implementation process for OpenStack thus widening the project's market," said Stephen O'Grady, principal analyst at RedMonk.

Red Hat also announced on Monday Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network, a global ecosystem of technology and services partners to help accelerate the adoption of Red Hat cloud infrastructures.

Red Hat claims that it is the largest contributor to the newest version of OpenStack, Grizzly, which was released this month.