Red Hat is still best known for its Linux distribution, but the company has also long offered its own OpenStack distribution and additional services as well. Today, the company launched version 12 of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
This update includes all of the usual stability improvements and bug fixes, but what’s probably most important for the distribution in the long run is that Red Hat is now starting to move all of its OpenStack platform to containers.
Version 12 of the platform is based on the OpenStack Pike release, the 16th release of OpenStack, which launched just over two months ago. Current Red Hat OpenStack Platform customers include the likes of BBVA, FICO, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and TechCrunch’s corporate overlords at Verizon.
Red Hat already has quite a bit of experience with containers and the Kubernetes orchestration engine thanks to its OpenShift platform. It’s no surprise then that the company is also betting on Kubernetes as the core container technology for this OpenStack containerization project as well.
The idea of “containerizing” OpenStack isn’t all that new, of course (and the OpenStack community has its own project for this, too), but as RedHat’s Nick Barcet told me, the company isn’t interested in being the first. In his view, RedHat’s success in the market is very much predicated on its ability to offer its customers a stable upgrade path that doesn’t break their current deployments. That’s also why this current release on uses containers for a subset of OpenStack Services and why some of the containerized networking and storage services are only available as a Technology Preview. Barcet stressed that the idea here is to move all these services over to containers over time, though he didn’t want to promise any exact dates for this.
Once that move is complete, though, rolling updates without any downtime will become the standard.