Red
Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open-source
solutions, today announced Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12, the latest
version of Red Hat's massively scalable and agile cloud
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Based on the OpenStack "Pike"
release, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 introduces containerized
services, improving flexibility while decreasing complexity for faster
application development. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 delivers many new
enhancements, including upgraded DCI (distributed continuous
integration) and improved security to help maintain data compliance and
manage risk.
Hundreds
of customers rely on Red Hat OpenStack Platform to power their hybrid
and private clouds for a variety of mission-critical deployments,
including BBVA; Cambridge University; FICO; Massachusetts Open Cloud; Turkcell; IAG;Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Paddy Power Betfair; Produban; UKCloud; and Verizon. And, Red Hat OpenStack Platform is backed by a robust ecosystem of partners, including Cisco, Dell EMC, Intel, Lenovo, Rackspace, and NetApp for enterprise businesses, as well as Ericsson, Nokia, NEC, Huawei, Cisco and others from the telecommunications industry.
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 is designed for private or public cloud infrastructure, built on the enterprise-grade backbone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 is a tested, certified, and
fully-supported version of OpenStack that provides the agility to scale
and more quickly meet customer demand without compromising availability,
performance, or IT security requirements. Red Hat OpenStack Platform
also includes Red Hat CloudForms,
Red Hat's multi-cloud management platform, to provide operational
visibility and policy-based management across the Red Hat OpenStack
Platform infrastructure and workloads. Additionally, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 maintains tight integration with Red Hat Ceph Storage, a highly-scalable block, object, and file storage solution, designed for scale-out clouds.
Containerization of OpenStack services
New
to Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 is the containerization of OpenStack
services. In addition to its leadership in OpenStack, Red Hat is a
leader in bringing containers to the enterprise and contributing to open
source projects that are driving container innovations. In order to
help deliver new offerings to market faster, today's organizations need a
cloud infrastructure that can allocate resources more quickly,
efficiently, and at scale. Running OpenStack services on Linux
containers does just that; it can increase flexibility for upgrades,
rollback and service management while reducing cloud management
complexity for operators. Additionally, Linux containers make it easier
to scale OpenStack services quickly, helping customers meet greater user
demand when it counts the most.
Whether
deploying a new implementation or performing an automated upgrade
through its director tool, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 containerizes
the majority of OpenStack services, while offering a containerized
Technology Preview of certain networking and storage services. This
provides our strategic ecosystem partners the opportunity to certify
drivers and plugins for this new deployment model, resulting in minimal
or no disruption of service for our customers.
Enhanced security
New
features in Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 such as an automated
infrastructure enrollment service help organizations increase security
and improve efficiency through the automation of life cycle management
for security certificates. Others components such as OpenStack Block
Storage (Cinder) and Bare Metal Provisioning (Ironic) have updates
around volume encryption support and disk partitioning enhancements,
respectively. As Red Hat continues to work towards stronger positioning
against various risk management initiatives across the globe, Red Hat
OpenStack Platform customers will have access to the new Red Hat security guide,
available in the Red Hat customer portal, outlining security features,
implementation, and guidance for meeting baseline security controls to
help enable a more secure OpenStack deployment.
Greater flexibility with composable infrastructure
Composable roles were first introduced in Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10, which enables operators to create customized profiles for individual services and processes to suit their unique needs. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 expanded
features for composable roles, making the deployment and upgradability
of Red Hat OpenStack Platform more adaptable and consistent. Now, Red
Hat OpenStack Platform 12 takes composability a step further with
composable networks. In previous versions, users were forced to pick and
choose pre-defined network topology. With new composable networks,
users have the option to define the network topology they need with
fewer constraints. Additionally, operators can create any number of
networks they want, including the popular L3 spine and leaf topology,
and are no longer limited in quantity of networks. These enhancements
make it easier for enterprises to customize OpenStack deployments to fit
their specific needs at scale.
Additionally,
Red Hat OpenStack 12 now includes support for the Distributed
Management Task Force's (DMTF) Redfish open API for composable
infrastructure. Support for this for this new industry specification
allows version 12 to interoperate with industry solutions that utilize
the Redfish API, such as the Intel® Rack Scale Design (Intel® RSD).
OpenDaylight for network automation
Version 12 extends its technology preview of OpenDaylight,
a modular open source platform for customizing and automating a
software-defined network. Designed to help our customers gain increased
speed and throughput, the advancement of Network function virtualization
(NFV) support through OpenDaylight for OpenStack remains a key strategy
for Red Hat. The enhancements to our OpenDaylight integration are
designed to not only improve the way Data Plane Developer Kit (DPDK) is
implemented, but also provide better performance due to its SDN
capabilities.
Distributed Continuous Integration
Five
releases ago, Red Hat's Distributed Continuous Integration (DCI)
introduced a new method for customers and partners to interact with Red
Hat OpenStack Platform. The primary goal of DCI is to help Red Hat ship
the best quality OpenStack software in the industry, done by automating
the deployment, testing, and feedback loop with customers and partners,
for pre- and post-product releases. This allows Red Hat to test
real-world use cases, validating each with customer and partner-driven
configurations. Today, DCI automatically delivers actionable logs to Red
Hat's quality engineering teams, reducing the amount of time it takes
to identify, patch, and introduce fixes back into the community.
Availability
Red
Hat OpenStack Platform 12 is scheduled to be available in the near
future via the Red Hat Customer Portal and as a component of the Red Hat
Cloud Infrastructure and Red Hat Cloud Suite solutions.