The past few months have been an exciting time for the RDO community, first launched at the April OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon. RDO, the freely available, community supported distribution of OpenStack runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and their derivatives.

It includes the Red Hat developed tool PackStack, which makes installation and configuration and deployment of the latest stable release of OpenStack easy and fast on Red Hat platforms, and a large community  has gathered at openstack.redhat.com, sharing knowledge and helping out other RDO users. The RDO community saw a very successful release, with many page visitors trying the distribution and engaging with the community.

Recently, we celebrated a milestone for the project: only six weeks after the project launch, more than 10,000 people had downloaded RDO. Our community has been growing steadily too, and with it the number and variety of threads on our discussion forum. At the time of writing, we have had 138 individual discussions, fueled by the participation of 362 engaged users.

Interested in trying OpenStack on Red Hat Enterprise Linux? New to the RDO community? Visit the RDO Quickstart page to deploy RDO, and have an OpenStack Grizzly cloud up and running in about twenty minutes.

We're thrilled to have a new member on the RDO team -- Rich Bowen has joined Red Hat to be the RDO Community Manager. Rich brings to RDO a wealth of community experience, having been a community manager at SourceForge. As the community manager, Rich will be executing on our strategic engagement plans for the RDO community, including managing the RDO forums, engaging with users at events and via social media, and evangelizing RDO to the community of users of OpenStack on Red Hat based platforms.

Are you at Red Hat Summit this week? The RDO community booth is in the Developer Lounge in the Partner Pavilion with Red Hat engineers working on OpenStack, live demos, and some cool RDO cheat sheet swag. We’ll also be raffling off two Nexus 4 phones, so make sure to visit us and drop off your business card. Want more information about OpenStack? We'll have plenty at Summit, with 20 sessions touching on OpenStack, and a hands-on lab as well.

Swing by the RDO booth and meet Rich, as well as our OpenStack developers, and hear more about what's going on in the RDO community!