Kubernetes Integration Deepened in Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14

Red Hat has added new automation capabilities to it latest Red Hat OpenStack cloud deployment and management platform which let customers run it on bare metal servers without virtualization.

The latest Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14, which was recently announced by the company, also gets several other useful new features for businesses, including easier automated deployment of production-ready, high-availability Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform clusters using Red Hat’s Integrated Director. It also now gets new integrated networking to enable OpenShift container-based and OpenStack virtual workloads from the same tenant to be connected to the same Kuryr virtual network for increased performance. Kuryr is a Docker network plugin that uses OpenStack Neutron connectivity-as-a-service to provide networking services to Docker containers

Other improvements include the automated use of OpenStack load balancer services to front-end container based workloads, as well as the use of integral OpenStack object storage to efficiently host container registries.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14 is based on the latest open source OpenStack release, called Rocky, which was recently released on the project’s normal every six-month schedule.

Joe Fernandes, Red Hat’s vice president of products for the company’s cloud platform division, told Channel Futures that the new features were the result of feedback and requests from business users, channel partners and from the OpenStack community.

Red Hat’s Joe Fernandes

“We have feedback directly from customers, many of whom run [the Red Hat OpenShift commercial Kubernetes platform] on Red Hat OpenStack,” he said.

The new automated provisioning feature that will allow users to run Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14 on bare metal was something that some users have been seeking for their own deployments, said Fernandes.

“Most of our customers who run containers run them on top of virtualized infrastructure, but there is still a small and growing segment who want to run containers and OpenShift directly on bare metal rather than on virtualized infrastructure, he said. “This new feature lets customers do that using OpenStack.”

Red Hat OpenShift is the company’s commercial enterprise Kubernetes platform.

The new networking capabilities in the latest Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14 were being sought as a desirable option by some business users, he said.

“When you set up Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14, it now will share a networking interface, Neutron, that’s used by OpenStack,” said Fernandes. “It’s the networking API for OpenStack and will bring them together on whatever network you are using.”

By using the OpenStack and OpenShift platforms together, customers are able to build an infrastructure that allows them to run a combination of traditional, virtualized and cloud-native workloads.

“You see the Kubernetes ecosystem continue to grow and OpenStack continues to be an enabler for that,” said Fernandes. “And not just for virtual environments, but for bare metal environments as well. We are seeing some interesting themes.”

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14 will be available to customers soon through the Red Hat Customer Portal and as a component of both Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure and Red Hat Cloud Suite.