UPDATED 18:00 EDT / NOVEMBER 05 2017

INFRA

Red Hat adds containerized services to its latest OpenStack Platform release

Red Hat Inc. is shipping out an updated version of its OpenStack infrastructure-as-a-service platform that’s designed to bring the features of public clouds such as Amazon Web Services to private data centers.

The company said Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 is based on the latest OpenStack Pike release that was shipped in August. One of the main new features in this version is the ability to run OpenStack services inside software containers for the first time.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform is an enterprise-grade version of the open-source OpenStack platform that’s based on the company’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. The company provides support and services, together with additional tools from Red Hat that aren’t included in the basic version, including the firm’s multicloud management platform CloudForms and its object and file storage platform Ceph.

The containerization of OpenStack services is the biggest deal with this latest release. Red Hat said OpenStack needed greater compatibility with software containers, which are used as a way of getting software to run reliably when it’s moved from one computing environment to another by abstracting away any differences in the underlying infrastructure.

With that in mind, it’s now possible to run OpenStack services on Linux containers, with benefits including increased flexibility for application upgrades, rollback and service management. The company added that Linux containers also make it easier to scale OpenStack services faster, allowing users to meet spikes in demand more easily.

Red Hat said the majority of OpenStack’s services have now been containerized. In addition, the new version also provides a containerized technology preview of some networking and storage services.

“To achieve the benefits offered by digital transformation, enterprises need to update their infrastructure to better support the next-generation of applications that take advantage of multiple hardware architectures, Linux container technologies, and cloud computing,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager of OpenStack at Red Hat.

OpenStack Pike also delivered a more modular architecture thanks to the addition of something called “composable networks” that are also included in the Red Hat release. This development follows the introduction of “composable roles” in OpenStack 10, which allows users to swap in or out specific modules and services according to what they actually need.

With composable networks, users can now define the network topology they require with fewer constraints, and they can create as many networks as they wish to fit their needs at scale. Previously users were limited in the quantity of available networks and could only choose a pre-defined network topology.

Red Hat didn’t provide an exact release date for OpenStack Platform 12, but said it will be made available in coming weeks.

Image: Jared Smith/Flickr

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