DEVOPSdigest

Red Hat announced Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14, the latest version of Red Hat’s massively-scalable, cloud-native apps-ready Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution.

Based on the OpenStack “Rocky” community release, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14 more tightly integrates with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, a comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, bringing even more support for Kubernetes to enterprise-grade OpenStack.

Paired with capabilities to improve bare-metal resource consumption and enhance deployment automation, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14 aims to deliver a single infrastructure offering that can lay the foundation for traditional, virtualized and cloud-native workloads.

"By more tightly integrating the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform in Red Hat OpenShift with the latest version of Red Hat OpenStack Platform, we’re providing a robust, more reliable foundation for cloud-native workloads. This enables IT teams to more effectively embrace innovation with the knowledge that they can expand, balance and manage the underlying infrastructure across various footprints, including bare-metal servers,” said Joe Fernandes, VP, Products, Cloud Platforms, Red Hat.

Built on the backbone of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat OpenStack Platform enables enterprises to transform their IT infrastructure into a more agile, efficient and innovative environment. Modular by design, it helps to optimize IT operations for existing traditional applications while serving as the foundation for cloud-native application development and deployment.

As the move to containers and cloud-native applications become prominent pieces of enterprise digital transformation strategies, being able to effectively deploy and scale enterprise-grade Kubernetes on OpenStack can become a necessity for IT teams. To help answer this challenge, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14 can not only host Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform but also automate critical provisioning and scalability requirements for Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform.

These capabilities include:

- Automated provisioning of bare metal and virtual infrastructure resources for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux nodes, helping to provide a unified cloud solution for both container and virtualized workloads for organizations moving towards cloud-native workloads on bare metal.

- Automated deployment of production-ready, high-availability Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform clusters, helping to provide a path towards 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 performance of the architecture

- 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

Additionally, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14 brings director-based scale-out and scale-in Red Hat OpenShift nodes, enabling businesses to expand or retract resources as workload requirements change. This can help to improve computing efficiency without limiting an organization’s ability to explore new service offerings or lines of business.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14 further extends integration with Red Hat Ansible Automation, making the deployment process easier than in previous versions. IT operations teams can now preview a Red Hat OpenStack Platform deployment before it goes live, helping them to better identify and resolve issues. Additional visibility is provided during the deployment process itself, enabling faster identification of failure points and remediation, including the capacity to repeat and re-apply isolated deployment steps if needed.

The latest version of Red Hat’s IaaS platform brings additional enhanced and new features to enterprise customers as well, including:

- 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 virtual machines

- 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

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.