Red Hat and OpenStack Announcement FAQ

What is being announced today?

• OpenStack is moving to a new foundation governance model, and Red Hat is joining that foundation as a Platinum Member.

What is OpenStack?

• OpenStack is an open source project for building private and public IaaS clouds. It includes three core projects around compute, object storage, and image service, as well as other related projects.

What is the OpenStack Foundation?

• The OpenStack Foundation is a new governance body for maintaining the OpenStack project. This foundation ensures that OpenStack will have an open and broad leadership community and reinforces the traditional open source values of meritocracy and community.

What has been Red Hat's previous involvement with OpenStack?

• Red Hat has already become one of the top code contributors to OpenStack in the open source community, with Red Hat engineers working across many aspects of the project. Additionally, Red Hat has been leading packaging and distribution efforts around the OpenStack code base. For example, Fedora 16 included OpenStack as one of its key features.

Why is Red Hat joining the OpenStack Foundation as a Platinum Member?

• Joining OpenStack was not a prerequisite for working with OpenStack in open source. Previously, Red Hat chose to focus on working on open source development with the OpenStack community. Now that OpenStack is moving to a foundation, Red Hat felt that this new governance structure would provide a good framework for enhancing open source collaboration around OpenStack.

How does OpenStack fit with what else Red Hat is doing around cloud?

• Red Hat is focused on delivering open hybrid clouds and has a broad portfolio that helps enterprises gain the benefits of cloud with no lock-in and across their choice of physical, virtual, and public cloud infrastructure. An open hybrid cloud allows enterprises to bring the benefits of cloud to all of their IT and adopt the cloud incrementally while preserving all their flexibility.

  Red Hat's open hybrid cloud portfolio includes Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for managing virtualized datacenters, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Middleware for building cloud applications, Red Hat Storage for hybrid cloud data access and storage, CloudForms for hybrid cloud management, and OpenShift for PaaS.

  OpenStack complements all these capabilities by enabling enterprises and service providers to build an open source IaaS capacity as a part of an open hybrid cloud.

Is Red Hat going to introduce an OpenStack-based product?

• Yes, Red Hat is planning to introduce an enterprise distribution of OpenStack. However, we are not announcing any specific product plans right now.