Red Hat just announced that it is making Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 available. This release is based upon the OpenStack ‘Newton’ release and is designed to increase system-wide scalability, simplify management and improve workload orchestration. It will also enhance both network performance and security.
Additionally, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 introduces a new software life cycle, with optional support up to 5 years.
New features
New enhancements and updates to Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 include:
- A more streamlined user experience driven by an easier-to-use graphical user interface (GUI) that reduces the complexities of installation and management. Designed for production use, the Red Hat OpenStack Platform director GUI provides several newly integrated functions, such as automatic upgrades and updates (including Ceph), advanced networking configuration, high availability, and the option to deploy file sharing via the Manila service, using the integrated drivers available from NetApp and Red Hat Ceph Storage.
- Improved flexibility for greater scalability through the introduction of customizable services and administration roles using Red Hat OpenStack Platform director. Cloud operators are now able to control their OpenStack environment at a more granular level by customizing OpenStack services to run and scale independently of each other. This offers greater flexibility when deploying services to match individual organizations’ unique workload requirements.
- Greater data assurance through new security-related enhancements, such as improved high availability (HA) for large scale deployments. Additionally, optional object storage encryption and ephemeral security tokens improve security measures and lower risk of data access due to theft.
- Improved performance for network-intensive workloads through the new data plane developer kit (DPDK) component of Open vSwitch, and single-root input/output virtualization (SR-IOV), results in network performance that is comparable to bare metal. Additionally, network routing is now more flexible and faster, allowing customers to choose between centralized routing or distributed routing (DVR).
- A new “ready state” hardware certification program, based on OpenStack Ironic. While Red Hat already supports certified hardware plug-ins for several OpenStack components, the new program is designed to expand the ecosystem of hardware options for automated bare-metal configuration. Dell EMC is the first Red Hat partner to be certified for Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 ready-state, with several more coming soon.
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 also introduces distributed continuous integration (DCI) to key partners, such as Dell EMC, NEC, and Rackspace. This collaborative approach to testing can help partners more effectively prepare for new Red Hat OpenStack Platform releases, and provide customers with greater stability and higher quality cloud solutions that have been tested many times over with their uniquely integrated cloud system than previously offered.
Snapshot analysis
As with other product announcements, Red Hat has reached into several open source technologies to optimize their use together, and with other Red Hat technology. This time, the focus is provisioning and operating OpenStack cloud computing environments. The company has integrated its edition of OpenStack with its virtual machine (VM) software, KVM; operating system software, Red Hat Enterprise Linux; directory services; identity management services; and application and system management services and development tools.
Each of these individual pieces of technology has been enhanced to fit together well with other Red Hat editions of open source technology, be easy to install together and easy to manage as a unit.
If an enterprise is willing to adopt everything Red Hat has assembled and is happy with Red Hat's selections of features and functions, the journey into a both a virtualized environment and a cloud environment will be straightforward and supportable.
Enterprises that have adopted Red Hat's view of "open source everywhere" and Red Hat's selection of features and functions would be well advised to continue to look to Red Hat for private cloud functions. When new applications are being considered, enterprises of all sizes that believe in Red Hat's vision of the world and open source should consider adopting Red Hat's products.