“Complexity has been the enemy to mainstream OpenStack adoption,” Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager of OpenStack at Red Hat, Inc., told theCUBE’s Stu Miniman during an interview at Red Hat Summit 2015. “I view OpenStack as an ingredient to the end destination the customer wants to get to.”

OpenStack is part of an open hybrid Cloud, which Balakrishnan described as a “mix and match with private and public Cloud.” On “both sides of the hybrid Cloud, OpenStack is an important part of the conversation,” he continued.

OpenStack Director to help ease challenges

73% of customers have concrete plans to get to OpenStack in the next 18 months, according to Balakrishnan. Of those customers surveyed, the number one challenge they mentioned is the deployment and management of OpenStack itself. To help with those issues, Red Hat is releasing a piece of technology called OpenStack Director, which does not replace any existing management software.

Red Hat developed the application using eNovance’s assets around deployment and management as a basis. With OpenStack Director, “You can make the life cycle management easier so that you can do in-place upgrade, mix and match components, as you’re living with OpenStack moving forward,” Balakrishnan explained.

Managing the infrastructure

He declared OpenStack Director to be a great way to get started with OpenStack, as well as manage the life cycle OpenStack layer. The application “plugs into satellite, it plugs into Cloud forms … it is architectured in a way that third-party applications can plug in too,” he continued.

OpenShift on OpenStack helps bring the whole portfolio together and “manage what they have with the OpenStack.” The application is a “core infrastructure block” and “a framework that brings all these elements together,” according to Balakrishnan. “Regardless whether you pick physical, virtual or containers, OpenStack becomes a way to manage that infrastructure.”

Red Hat has 275 partners for OpenStack, but Balakrishnan referred to Intel, Dell and Cisco as “deeply” partnered. Red Hat plans a new release this summer.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE