An OpenStack®️-based cloud environment can help you digitally transform to succeed in fast-paced, competitive markets. However, for many organizations, deploying open source software supported only by the community can be intimidating. Red Hat®️ OpenStack Platform combines community-powered innovation with enterprise-grade features and support to help your organization build a production-ready private cloud.

Through an open source development model, community leadership, and production-grade life-cycle options, Red Hat makes open source software more accessible for production use across industries and organizations of any size and type.

Open source development model

In order for open source technologies to be effective in production, they must provide stability and performance while also delivering the latest features and advances. Our open source development model combines fast-paced, cross-industry community innovation with production-grade hardening, integrations, support, and services. We take an upstream-first approach by contributing all developments back to the upstream community. This makes new features immediately available and helps to drive the interoperability of Red Hat products with upstream releases. Based on community OpenStack releases, Red Hat OpenStack Platform is intensively tested and hardened to meet the rigors of production environments. Ongoing patching, bug fixes, and certification keep your environment up and running.

Community leadership

We know that open source technologies can be of the highest quality and work with communities to deliver robust code. Red Hat is the top code contributor to the OpenStack community. We are responsible for 28% of the code in the Queens release and 18% of the code across all releases. We collaborate with our customers, partners, and industry organizations to identify the features they need to be successful. We then work to add that functionality into OpenStack. Over time, these efforts have resulted in enhancements in OpenStack’s availability, manageability, and performance, as well as industry-specific additions like OpenDaylight support for telecommunications.

Production-grade life-cycle options

The OpenStack community delivers new releases every six months, which can be challenging for many organizations looking to deploy OpenStack-based production environments. We provide stable branch releases of OpenStack that are supported for an enterprise production life cycle—beyond the six-month release cycle of the OpenStack community. With Red Hat OpenStack Platform, we give you two life-cycle options that let you choose when to upgrade and add new features to your cloud environment.

• Standard release cadence. Upgrade every six to twelve months between standard releases to stay aligned with the latest features as they become available. Standard releases include one year of support.
• Long-life release cadence. Standardize on long-life releases for up to five years. Long-life releases include three years of support, with the option to extend support for an additional two years with extended life-cycle support (ELS), for up to five years of support total. All new features are included with each long-life release.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform director—an integrated deployment and life-cycle management tool—streamlines upgrades between standard releases. And, the new fast forward upgrade feature in director lets you easily transition between long-life releases, without the need to upgrade to each in-between release. So, if you are currently using Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10, you now have an easy upgrade path to Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13—with fewer interruptions, no need for additional hardware, and simpler implementation of containerized OpenStack services.

Learn more

Red Hat OpenStack Platform can help you overcome the challenges of deploying OpenStack into production use. And, if you aren’t sure about how to build your cloud environment, don’t have the time or resources to do so, or just want some help on your cloud journey, we provide a variety of expert services and training.

Learn more about Red Hat OpenStack Platform:

• Red Hat OpenStack Platform product page
• Red Hat OpenStack Platform: Two life-cycle choices to fit your organization
• Online documentation
• Free 60-day evaluation