Red Hat Inc. said today it’s rebranding the Red Hat OpenStack Platform, which will now be known as Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift.

The rebrand follows a years-long effort by the company, owned by IBM Corp., to integrate Red Hat OpenStack Platform more tightly with Red Hat OpenShift. The goal is to help service providers scale up their private clouds faster and maximize their computing resources. Red Hat said doing this has enabled it to help teams managing OpenStack clouds benefit from OpenShift’s modern operational experience.

Red Hat OpenStack is an open-source platform that’s used by organizations to pool virtual resources to build and manage private clouds, and it has proven especially popular with telecommunications and managed services providers. Meanwhile, RedHat OpenShift is an enterprise-ready application platform that’s built on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system and container orchestration software Kubernetes. It provides deployment and infrastructure services that support almost any kind of application and computing environment.

“By integrating Kubernetes with OpenStack, organizations see improved resource management and scalability, greater flexibility across the hybrid cloud, simplified development and DevOps practices and more,” said Sean Cohen, director of product management in Red Hat’s Hybrid Platforms organizations.

Red Hat explained that it’s integrating the two platforms because customers are looking for a speedy and simplified private cloud offering that enables them to move their 4G-based virtual network functions to 5G cloud-native workloads. With Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift, they now have a simpler way to do that.

The new platform makes it possible for existing applications to continue running without any interruptions. The new “podified” control plane, which is a set of tools for deploying and managing the OpenStack control plane as a Kubernetes-native pod, makes it easier to deploy cloud-native workloads. The net benefit is easier installation, more rapid deployments and unified management from the core to the edge, Red Hat said.

In addition, Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift provides companies with the ability to run virtualized and containerized apps based on bare metal servers, meaning they have greater flexibility in how they use their computing resources. Other benefits include fast parallel processing for swift, repeatable deployments using the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, better scalability through the new podified control plane, an improved observability experience, and enhanced security that relies on an encrypted memory cache, encrypted communications between services and secure role-based access.

The rebranding of the OpenStack Platform is part of a wider consolidation effort by Red Hat’s parent company IBM Corp., said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. He noted that the noise around OpenStack has largely abated, as none of the major public cloud vendors have adopted it and many of its former contributors have moved on to other projects.

“Instead, OpenStack has found its place in the telecommunications industry, where many operators use it to build private clouds to run their networks on,” the analyst said. “This is who Red Hat is targeting with these announcements.”

Moving forward, the company said Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift’s control plane will be natively hosted on Red Hat OpenShift, while the external RHEL-based dataplane will be managed with the Ansible Automation platform. It means that Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17.1 is the last version to be based on the classic form-factor of a control plane that could be either virtualized or bare metal, with management performed by OpenStack Director.

Red Hat said it will continue to provide support for the classic form factor until the end of OpenStack Platform 17.1’s lifecycle. After this time, customers will need to migrate and deploy their new controller on OpenShift.

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