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​Red Hat blends Kubernetes into Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14

OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud meets Kubernetes cloud container orchestration.
Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor

There was a bit of fear when IBM acquired Red Hat that Red Hat might abandon the OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud. Nah!

In Berlin at OpenStack Summit, Red Hat introduced its latest OpenStack distribution: Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14. It comes with a generous helping of Kubernetes container orchestration via Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

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Red Hat's new OpenStack is built on top of the OpenStack "Rocky" community release. This version is noted for its significant bare-metal improvements in Ironic, its bare metal provisioning module, as well as in Nova, its compute instances provisioning program. Red Hat makes use of both improvements by automated provisioning of bare metal and virtual infrastructure resources in its OpenShift Container Platform.

To manage those containers, no matter if they're on bare metal or in a Virtual Machine (VM), the new OpenStack Platform 14 is more tightly integrated than ever with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Together, OpenStack Platform 14 aims to deliver a single infrastructure offering for traditional, virtualized, and cloud-native workloads.

This combination also provides new capabilities:

  • Automated deployment of production-ready, high-availability Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform clusters, helping to provide a path toward continuous operations without a single point of failure.
  • Integrated networking enabling OpenShift container-based and OpenStack virtual workloads from the same tenant to be connected to the same virtual network (Kuryr) increasing network performance.
  • Automated use of built-in OpenStack load balancer services to front-end container based workloads.
  • Use of built-in OpenStack object storage to more efficiently host container registries.
  • Director-based scale-out and scale-in Red Hat OpenShift nodes, enabling businesses to expand or retract resources as workload requirements change.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14 also extends its integration with Red Hat Ansible Automation, Red Hat's DevOps tool. This makes deploying OpenStack -- always tricky -- much easier than in previous versions.

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The latest version also includes:

  • Processor scalability for emerging and extreme workloads like artificial intelligence (AI) and graphics rendering through a Technology Preview of NVIDIA GRID Virtual PC (vPC) capabilities. This enables the sharing of NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) across virtual machines and applications, making it easier to scale resources to meet the demands of intensive applications.
  • Improved storage availability, management, data migration, and security through enhanced integration with Red Hat Ceph Storage including the ability to share the same Cinder storage volume across multiple VMs.
  • Inclusion of Skydive, a innovative, layer-independent network analysis tool that simplifies the validation, documentation, and troubleshooting of complex virtual network topologies as a Technology Preview.

Finally, Red Hat continues to support not only x86 processors, but IBM Power architecture as well. Yes, this means you could set up an OpenStack cloud, which could run across both Commercial off-the-shelf x86 servers and mainframes.

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In a statement Joe Fernandes, Red Hat's Cloud Platforms vice president concluded:

"As the de facto standard in Linux container orchestration, Kubernetes adoption is often a key part of the technology mix for enterprise digital transformation, but this can require a scalable, flexible foundation for organizations to realize its full potential. By more tightly integrating the industry's most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform in OpenShift with the latest version of Red Hat OpenStack Platform, we're providing a robust, more reliable foundation for cloud-native workloads."

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14 will be available in the coming weeks via the Red Hat Customer Portal and as a component of both Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure and Red Hat Cloud Suite.

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