Red Hat has introduced 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.
