Red Hat Inc. is upping its Kubernetes game with the release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14, the latest version of its infrastructure-as-a-service product.

The new version announced early today, which is based upon the OpenStack “Rocky” community version, improves integration with OpenShift, Red Hat’s own version of Kubernetes, and features better support for bare-metal deployments and improved automation.

OpenStack is Red Hat’s platform for organizations and service providers that want to run a hybrid cloud infrastructure consisting of common elements that run both on-premises and in public clouds. Improved OpenShift integration is a nod to the surging popularity of Kubernetes, which enables applications to be encapsulated and moved across platforms.

“We’ve made it extremely simply to expand and integrate container workloads in the same application,” said Ron Pacheco, director of product management for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Containers are small, portable virtual machines that include all the elements needed to run applications.

The new release reduces the number of overlay networks that are required for communication between “pods,” which are containers that share storage or network resources and common runtime specifications. Workflows belonging to the same tenant can now freely communicate, a performance-enhancing feature that enables applications to combine services based upon both virtual machines and containers.

Provisioning has been simplified so that both OpenStack and OpenShift can be set up at the same time rather than sequentially. They also share a common management interface.

Bare-metal refers to servers that don’t have a virtualization layer, an option that’s often used when performance is at a premium or when machines need to be isolated from each other in highly secure applications. “More and more customers asking for containers to run on bare metal,” Pacheco said.

Other automation features include automated deployment of high-availability OpenShift clusters, a built-in load balancer front-end for container-based workloads, use of OpenStack object storage to host container registries and tighter integration with the company’s version of the popular Ansible automation engine for software provisioning, configuration management and application deployment.

Finally, Red Hat is improving processor scalability for workloads using Nvidia Corp.’s Grid Virtual PC, a server-side environment that delivers a personal computerlike experience.

The new release will be available within a few weeks, Red Hat said.

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