Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 is here!

Accelerate. Innovate. Empower.

In the digital economy, IT organizations can be expected to deliver services anytime, anywhere, and to any device. IT speed, agility, and innovation can be critical to help stay ahead of your competition. Red Hat OpenStack Platform lets you build an on-premise cloud environment designed to accelerate your business, innovate faster, and empower your IT teams.

Accelerate. Red Hat OpenStack Platform can help you accelerate IT activities and speed time to market for new products and services. Red Hat OpenStack Platform helps simplify application and service delivery using an automated self-service IT operating model, so you can provide users with more rapid access to resources. Using Red Hat OpenStack Platform, you can build an on-premises cloud architecture that can provide resource elasticity, scalability, and increased efficiency to launch new offerings faster.

Innovate. Red Hat OpenStack Platform enables you differentiate your business by helping to make new technologies more accessible without sacrificing current assets and operations. Red Hat’s open source development model combines faster-paced, cross-industry community innovation with production-grade hardening, integrations, support, and services. Red Hat OpenStack Platform is designed to provide an open and flexible cloud infrastructure ready for modern, containerized application operations while still supporting the traditional workloads your business relies on.

Empower. Red Hat OpenStack Platform helps your IT organization deliver new services with greater ease. Integrations with Red Hat’s open software stack let you build a more flexible and extensible foundation for modernization and digital operations. A large partner ecosystem helps you customize your environment with third-party products, with greater confidence that they will be interoperable and stable.

With Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13, Red Hat continues to bring together community-powered innovation with the stability, support, and services needed for production deployment. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 is a long-life release with up to three years of standard support and an additional, optional two years of extended life-cycle support (ELS). This release includes many features to help you adopt cloud technologies more easily and support digital transformation initiatives.

Fast forward upgrades

With both standard and long-life releases, Red Hat OpenStack Platform lets you choose when to implement new features in your cloud environment:

• Upgrade every six months and benefit from one year of support on each release.
• Upgrade every 18 months with long-life releases and benefit from 3 years of support on that release, with an optional ELS totalling to up to 5 years of support. Long life releases include innovations from all previous releases.

Now, with the fast forward upgrade feature, you can skip between long-life releases on an 18-month upgrade cadence. Fast forward upgrades fully containerize Red Hat OpenStack Platform deployment to simplify the process of upgrading between long-life releases. This means that customers who are currently using Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 have an easier upgrade path to Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13—with fewer interruptions and no need for additional hardware.

Containerized OpenStack services

Red Hat OpenStack Platform now supports containerization of all OpenStack services. This means that OpenStack services can be independently managed, scaled, and maintained throughout their life cycle, giving you more control and flexibility. As a result, you can simplify service deployment and upgrades and allocate resources more quickly, efficiently, and at scale.

Red Hat stack integrations

The combination of Red Hat OpenStack Platform with Red Hat OpenShift provides a modern, container-based application development and deployment platform with a scalable hybrid cloud foundation. Kubernetes-based orchestration simplifies application portability across scalable hybrid environments, designed to provide a consistent, more seamless experience for developers, operations, and users.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 delivers several new integrations with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform:

• Integration of openshift-ansible into Red Hat OpenStack Platform director eases troubleshooting and deployment.
• Network integration using the Kuryr OpenStack project unifies network services between the two platforms, designed to eliminate the need for multiple network overlays and reduce performance and interoperability issues.  
• Load Balancing-as-a-Service with Octavia provides highly available cloud-scale load balancing for traditional or containerized workloads.

Additionally, support for the Open Virtual Networking (OVN) networking stack supplies consistency between Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat OpenShift, and Red Hat Virtualization.

Security features and compliance focus

Security and compliance are top concerns for organizations deploying clouds. Red Hat OpenStack Platform includes integrated security features to help protect your cloud environment. It encrypts control flows and, optionally, data stores and flows, enhancing the privacy and integrity of your data both at rest and in motion.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 introduces several new, hardened security services designed to help further safeguard enterprise workloads:

• Programmatic, API-driven secrets management through Barbican
• Encrypted communications between OpenStack services using Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
• Cinder volume encryption and Glance image signing and verification

Additionally, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 can help your organization meet relevant technical and operational controls found in risk management frameworks globally. Red Hat can help support compliance guidance provided by government standards organizations, including:

• The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a U.S. government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services.
• Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d'information (ANSSI) is the French national authority for cyber-defense and network and information security (NIS).

A updated security guide is also available to help you when deploying a cloud environment.

Storage and hyperconverged infrastructure options

Red Hat Ceph Storage provides unified, highly scalable, software-defined block, object, and file storage for Red Hat OpenStack Platform deployments and services. Integration between the two enables you to deploy, scale, and manage your storage back end just like your cloud infrastructure. New storage integrations included in Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 give you more choice and flexibility. With support for the OpenStack Manila project, you can use the CephFS NFS file share as a service to better support applications using file storage. As a result, you can choose the type of storage for each workload, from a unified storage platform.

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud combines Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage into a single offering with a common life cycle and support. Both Red Hat OpenStack Platform compute and Red Hat Ceph Storage functions are run on the same host, enabling consolidation and efficiency gains. NFV use cases for Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud include:

• Core datacenters
• Central office datacenters
• Edge and remote point of presence (POP) environments
• Virtual radio access networks (vRAN)
• Content delivery networks (CDN)

You can also add hyperconverged capabilities to your current Red Hat OpenStack Platform subscriptions using an add-on SKU.

Telecommunications optimizations

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 delivers new telecommunications-specific features that allow CSPs to build innovative, cloud-based network infrastructure more easily:

• OpenDaylight integration lets you connect your OpenStack environment with the OpenDaylight software-defined networking (SDN) controller, giving it greater visibility into and control over OpenStack networking, utilization, and policies.
• Real-time Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) support designed to deliver ultra-low latency for performance-sensitive environments.
• Open vSwitch (OVS) offload support (tech preview) lets you implement single root input/output virtualization (SR-IOV) to help reduce the performance impact of virtualization and deliver better performance for high IOPS applications.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform and OpenDaylight cooperation

 

Learn more

Red Hat OpenStack Platform combines community-powered innovation with enterprise-grade features and support to help your organization build a production-ready private cloud. With it, you can accelerate application and service delivery, innovate faster to differentiate your business, and empower your IT teams to support digital initiatives.

Learn more about Red Hat OpenStack Platform:

• Red Hat OpenStack Platform product page
• Online documentation