BERLIN—Red Hat announced its OpenStack Platform 14 update on Nov. 15, providing users of the open-source cloud platform with an incremental set of new features.
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14 is based on the upstream OpenStack Rocky milestone, which became publicly available on Aug. 30. Among the new features in OSP 14 are improved networking capabilities, including enhanced load balancing capabilities for container workloads. Red Hat is also continuing to push forward on the integration of its OpenShift Kubernetes container orchestration platform with OpenStack.
In a video interview with eWEEK, Mark McLoughlin, senior director of engineering of OpenStack at Red Hat, outlined some of the new features in OSP 14 and the direction for the road ahead.
“In this release, we’re focused on our OpenShift and OpenStack. In particular, we’re focused on OpenShift on bare metal, and that’s now supported in OSP 14,” he said.
The way the bare metal support works is via the OSP Director 2 management technology, which is based on the OpenStack TripleO (OpenStack On OpenStack) project, according to McLoughlin.
“You basically register your hardware inventory with [OSP Director] and how to deploy and manage upgrades for OpenStack, Ceph [storage], OpenShift and RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux],” he said.
Management of RHEL is typically accomplished with the Red Hat Satellite service. McLoughlin explained that the OSP deployment of RHEL is for organizations that are deploying clusters of OpenStack servers.
OSP 14 is a short-term release, and Red Hat will only support it for one year. In contrast, the prior OSP 13 update was a long-term support release that Red Hat will support for up to five years. McLoughlin explained that every third OSP update is a long-term support update. Red Hat started its long-term support cycle approach with the OSP 10 update in December 2016.
The last long life release for Red Hat OpenStack Platform was the December 2016 OSP 10. New releases of OpenStack debut every six months in the open-source community.
Watch the full video interview with McLoughlin above.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.