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In a day filled with news about companies adopting OpenStack Queens, Red Hat, a leading OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, stood out with its release of its long-term support Red Hat OpenStack Platform (RHOP) 13 since it's one of OpenStack's most stalwart supporters.
At OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, Canada, Red Hat announced RHOP 13's release. RHOP is scheduled to be available in June via the Red Hat Customer Portal and as a component of both Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure and Red Hat Cloud Suite.
This release comes five years after Red Hat decided its future was in the OpenStack cloud. With this release, Radhesh Balakrishnan, Red Hat's general manager of OpenStack, said, "RHOP 13 is the first complete containerized OpenStack." In short, you can run all of RHOP inside containers if you want.
Balakrishnan added, "Our customers have been asking us to make it easy to run Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (RHOCP)," Red Hat's Kubernete's offering, "with RHOP.
"We want to make this as seamless as possible," Balakrishnan said.
Red Hat states RHOP is designed to accelerate the delivery of applications and services by empowering organizations to innovate with greater confidence through an extensible, production-ready private cloud. When RHOP is combined with Red Hat, it offers a full private to public cloud offering.
RHOP 13 is designed to enable users to build an on-premises cloud architecture with improved resource elasticity and scalability. To help enterprises achieve this goal, RHOP 13 features greater cross-portfolio integration with Red Hat's portfolio of hybrid-cloud technologies. This includes:
- Red Hat CloudForms to better ease day-to-day management tasks for hybrid cloud infrastructure.
- Red Hat Ceph Storage for massively scalable, integrated storage, which enables organizations to more quickly provision hundreds of virtual machines from a single snapshot and build a fully-supported storage solution.
- Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform helps Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 serve as an extensible platform for cloud-native workloads. It provides a single architecture to bring together Linux containers on Kubernetes orchestration to RHOP.
To help further simplify the upgrade process between RHOP releases, the new RHOP introduces Fast Forward upgrades. This feature enables you to update to the latest OpenStack release while minimizing operational risk. Fast Forward gives customers the option to use a faster upgrade path and receive new features from the upstream community every six months, or they can remain on a release for five years. So, for example, starting with RHOP 13, customers who are currently on RHOP 10 can upgrade to the newest version with fewer reboots.
RHOP 13's new features include:
- Containerization of OpenStack services: Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 introduced OpenStack services containerization. RHOP 13 builds upon this capability by containerizing all OpenStack services, including networking and storage, for the first time in a Red Hat OpenStack offering.
- Upgraded OpenStack security capabilities: Through the integration of security-related projects such as OpenStack Barbican, RHOP 13 provides tenant level lifecycle management of secrets, such as passwords, security certificates, and keys. With the introduction of Barbican, encryption-related use cases are now available, such as Cinder encrypted volume support, Glance image signing, and Swift object encryption. RHOP 13 also features increased TLS coverage for internal communication flows for network services such as VNC, OpenDaylight, and Redis. The introduction of these features can enable customers to better comply with security standards such as FedRAMP, SecNumCloud, and other industry specific risk management frameworks.
In addition, RHOP 13 will deliver improvements for telecom with:
- Integration and support for OpenDaylight, a modular open-source platform for customizing and automating a software-defined network (SDN), through the RHOP director. This integration helps customers benefit from this popular SDN.
- Real-time KVM compute role, powered by the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Real Time Kernel for environments where ultra-low latency is a requirement.
Will all this work for your company? Al Sadowski, 451 Research's research vice president, thinks it will. Sadowski said, "Success in today's digital economy hinges upon a new approach to IT, one that focuses on faster delivery of services and tighter integration with heterogeneous cloud technologies. Red Hat OpenStack Platform provides organizations with the tools needed to deliver and scale the latest innovations with a consistent operational experience."