At the OpenStack Summit today, Red Hat announced RDO, “a freely available, community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and their derivatives.” In essence, RDO will function for Red Hat OpenStack much like Fedora does for Red Hat Enterprise Linux: new features will land upstream, get integrated into RDO, and eventually make their way into the commercially supported offering.
From the press release:
RDO brings the core OpenStack components – Nova, Glance, Keystone, Cinder, Quantum, Swift and Horizon – as well as incubating projects Heat, for cloud application orchestration, and Ceilometer, for resource monitoring and metering. Installation is made easy with the Red Hat-developed installation tool, PackStack.
That last bit is interesting. OpenStack is a complex suite of tools, and the installation process is non-trivial. Any work to streamline that will reduce at least one barrier to success.
As for the name, RDO? It stands for “Red Hat Distribution of OpenStack.” Not quite as catchy as “Fedora,” but what can you do?
In order to make the adoption of Red Hat OpenStack as easy as possible, Red Hat also announced today the launch of an official Cloud Infrastructure Partner Program, “a multi-tiered program designed for third-party commercial companies that offer hardware, software and services for customers to implement cloud infrastructure solutions powered by Red Hat OpenStack.” Cisco, Intel, and Mirantis are all on board as early members of the Partner Program, along with 25 other companies.
Red Hat is the largest contributor of code to the latest release of OpenStack, and today’s announcements make it clear that OpenStack is a key part of Red Hat’s ongoing strategy.