2.5 billion and counting: Red Hat OpenStack Platform continues to deliver for service providers

Red Hat is excited to announce the general availability of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17 at MWC Las Vegas this year. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17 is designed to help service providers as they build out massive, modern networks with an open hybrid cloud vision in mind. With this latest version, service providers can benefit from the delivery of new services and applications to meet changing demand, advanced networking and improved operational security features for their 4G and 5G networks. 

It’s been over a decade since the creation of the OpenStack project. Since then, Red Hat OpenStack Platform has become a leading technology for service provider cloud environments that propels innovation and is one of the top NFV infrastructure for service providers with over 30% of the paid production LTE deployments. Today, Red Hat service provider customers running Red Hat OpenStack Platform are estimated to have more than 2.5 billion mobile subscribers. 

Now, as organizations look to transform their network infrastructures to be cloud-native, Red Hat OpenStack Platform provides an integral piece of that evolution. Red Hat’s highly scalable, open and agile cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform will give service providers the ability to deploy innovative and differentiated services and applications and achieve new levels of efficiency. This update enables providers to explore both the benefits of Red Hat OpenStack Platform along with Red Hat OpenShift for increased resilience from the core to the edge and the ability to run both virtual network functions (VNFs) and cloud-native network functions (CNFs) with bare-metal performance side-by-side in their network. 

New and enhanced features for the latest version include:

• Dynamic resource allocation and director lite deployment - for simplifying deployments with fewer required services and a smaller footprint.

• High availability (HA) helps to deliver controller HA for deployment across Layer 2 (L2) networks and multirack HA. 

• Improved day 1-2 operations with OVN Migration for enhanced workload migration and additional OVN networking tools to help validate migration from OVS to OVN. 

• Hardware offload support for SmartNICS to provide acceleration for security groups, crypto tasks and more. 

• Improved security features with a tech preview of roles-based access control (RBAC) for expanded and more granular enforcement across OpenStack services to help deliver increased functionality, improved suitability and a reduced attack surface.  

• Extended lifecycle management for continuous feature updates.

• Virtualized control plane on Red Hat OpenShift allowing customers to run cloud-native and virtual machines within the same infrastructure.  

• Red Hat Ceph Storage 5 introduced with a new cephadm integration that improves functionality and allows deployments to scale more easily. 

With the latest version of Red Hat OpenStack Platform, integrated with Red Hat OpenShift, service providers will be able to further realize use cases such as 5G core, edge deployments including hyperconverged infrastructure, networking, storage and compute and open virtualized radio access networks. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17 is generally available through the Red Hat Customer Portal via a Red Hat subscription.