What’s New in Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12
When the OpenStack project first began in 2010, organizations were looking for software tools to run their cloud infrastructure. Today, 23 percent of organizations are using OpenStack in their production environments, according to a recent survey.
OpenStack is a set of open source software tools for building and managing public and private clouds. It makes it easy to deploy virtual machine instances for fast horizontal scaling. It also provides a dashboard for provisioning and controlling pools of compute, storage and networking resources. A number of vendors also offer proprietary OpenStack distributions.
The Red Hat OpenStack Platform is a tested, certified and fully supported version of OpenStack that provides greater agility without compromising availability, performance or IT security requirements. It also includes Red Hat CloudForms, a multi-cloud management platform that provides operational visibility and policy-based management across the Red Hat OpenStack Platform infrastructure and workloads.
The new Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 is based on the OpenStack “Pike” release. OpenStack Platform 12 delivers many new features, including containerized services, improved security, composable networks and network automation.
Containerization of OpenStack Services. Today’s organizations need a cloud infrastructure that can allocate resources efficiently. Running OpenStack services in Linux containers does just that. It can increase flexibility for upgrades, rollback and service management while reducing cloud management complexity. Additionally, Linux containers make it easier to scale OpenStack services quickly. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 containerizes the majority of OpenStack services, whether deploying a new implementation or performing an automated upgrade through its director tool.
Enhanced Security. New features in Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 help organizations increase security and improve efficiency through the automation of lifecycle management for security certificates. In addition, the OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder) component now has improved volume encryption support, and Bare Metal Provisioning (Ironic) has enhanced disk partitioning. Red Hat OpenStack Platform customers will also have access to the new Red Hat security guide, available in the Red Hat customer portal, outlining security features, implementation and guidance for meeting baseline security controls to help enable a more secure OpenStack deployment.
Composable Infrastructure. First introduced in Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10, composable roles enable users to create customized profiles for individual services and processes to suit their unique needs. Now, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 takes composability a step further with composable networks. In previous versions, users were forced to pick and choose predefined network topology. With new composable networks, users have the option to define the network topology they need with fewer constraints. Additionally, users can create any number of networks they want, including the popular L3 spine-and-leaf topology. These enhancements make it easier for enterprises to customize OpenStack deployments to fit their specific needs at scale.
OpenDaylight for Network Automation. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 extends its technology preview of OpenDaylight, a modular open source platform for customizing and automating a software-defined network. OpenDaylight for OpenStack also provides network functions virtualization support to help customers gain increased speed and throughput.
Technologent is a Red Hat partner with expertise in OpenStack, containerization and other components of modern, software-defined architectures. Let us help you leverage OpenStack tools to support your cloud environment.
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