Community Profile--RDO Project

Community Profile: RDO Project
Name: RDO
Initial Release: April 15, 2013
Community Manager: Rich Bowen
Downstream: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Openstack Platform (RHELOSP)
Upstream: OpenStack
Governance: A collaborative, community-driven governance that communicates through IRC and various RDO mailing lists. (rdo-list@redhat.com)
Web Site: https://www.rdoproject.org
Social Media: Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus
Software: Download, Source Code
Description: A free distribution of OpenStack that runs on CentOS, Fedora, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. RDO is different from many other OpenStack distributions in that it is community-supported. OpenStack is open source software to build public and private clouds.

The Open Source and Standards (OSAS) team at Red Hat continues to support a variety of open source projects driven by different communities. Of the communities that OSAS supports, RDO will be the second community highlighted in our new blog series. The goal of these blogs is that readers will further understand the highlight community and how they play into the Red Hat ecosystem.

As part of the Red Hat ecosystem, RDO makes it easy to install the latest and greatest OpenStack components on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well as CentOS and Fedora. Because RDO is community driven, a variety of people can work on its code to constantly improve the software. Red Hat also provides a supported enterprise edition – Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

RDO started in April 2013, when Red Hat sponsored the it as an upstream OpenStack project. Althoug in the early phases of the project, it was primarily driven by Red Hat engineers, users at a meetup at the OpenStack Summit in Paris made it clear that they wanted more input in the governance of the project. Since then, the project has become more community driven, and participation outside of Red Hat continues to grow.

RDO provides packaging of the upstream OpenStack software, and tools to deploy it on RPM-based distributions. The project also provides CI and testing of these packages, to ensure that everything always works. Much of this work is done in conjunction with the CentOS community, as part of the Cloud SIG (Special Interest Group). The latest packages, based on upstream releases, can always be found at http://trunk.rdoproject.org/.

Many organizations and people use RDO in a variety of projects. CERN – the European Center for Nuclear Research – runs a 100,000 node OpenStack cluster running RDO, for doing the data processing associated with their particle accelerator.

During this year's Google Summer of Code, student Asadullah Hussain worked on a project to produce a “Cloud In A Box”. This project allows RDO to be downloaded and installed simultaneously with the CentOS Linux distribution.

OpenStack Summit Tokyo is a big upcoming event for RDO. At this event, RDO will be hosting a meetup where users and contributors can meet up and discuss the future of RDO. The meetup will take place on Wednesday, October 28 in the Sakura Tower from 12:45 p.m.-2:00 p.m. Many Red Hatters will be speaking at OpenStack Summit Tokyo as well. View the OpenStack Summit schedule to find out more.