Red Hat Releases OpenStack Platform 8, Revamps Cloud Suite

Red Hat is today continuing its OpenStack and hybrid cloud march with the release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8 alongside the general availability of the Red Hat Cloud Suite – a week before the OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas.

Red Hat is now boasting a comprehensive and integrated hybrid cloud stack, with added container support coming from the company’s OpenShift platform. The firm’s also trying to help customers “bridge the gap” between development and operations: DevOps.

OpenStack Platform 8 is sitting on Liberty, the previous release of OpenStack before this month’s Mitaka release.

OpenStack platform

While OpenStack-based private and hybrid clouds are becoming widely accepted in some enterprise computing circles, OpenStack deployment is not always as easy as OpenStack claims it to be.

Just this week, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said on his company’s earnings call that customers have tried to take advantage of OpenStack deployments but fail to do so after coming up short for a true scalable environment.

OpenStack acknowledges the difficulties in sometimes deploying and distributing OpenStack, and that is why its latest version, OpenStack Mitaka is the simplest its ever been. It’s also why Red Hat has concentrated on support and simplicity for OpenStack Platform 8.

“Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8 and Red Hat Cloud Suite showcase the power of Red Hat’s open innovation,” said Tim Yeaton, senior vice president of Infrastructure Business at Red Hat.

“”ith solutions that can address nearly any private cloud deployment scenario while at the same time delivering a streamlined cloud-native application development platform coupled with the needed enterprise-level controls for cloud management and improved security.”

Customers can also take advantage of Red Hat’s unified management tools, called CloudForms.

Updates

OpenStack Platform 8 now natively includes automated upgrades and updates, infrastructure and workload management, software-defined storage, and a telco-focused preview.

Red Hat bunged a statement from one of its customers, Volvo IT, in its release today. Odd Waller, a Java Hosting Service Design manager, said that OpenStack is all about innovation.

“A strategic priority for our team is to introduce new, cloud-based connected services that can innovate our offerings, including mobile apps, a cloud user portal and call center services, and more,” he said.

“To do this, we needed a standardized cloud infrastructure that would enable us to deploy our newly-built applications anywhere. An open hybrid cloud, based on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and CloudForms, enabled us to create a multi-tier architecture that could support our continuous integration and DevOps mod.”

Quiz: Cloud in 2016