Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift – the next generation of Red Hat OpenStack Platform

Article by Sean Cohen, Director of Product Management-Hybrid Platforms, Red Hat

Red Hat is excited to announce the development preview of the next major release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform — Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift*. It’s no secret that over the last few years, Red Hat has been working to more tightly integrate Red Hat OpenStack Platform with Red Hat OpenShift to help service providers scale faster and maximize their resources. In doing so, we've been able to help teams managing OpenStack clouds to leverage the more modern operational experience of OpenShift. By integrating Kubernetes with OpenStack, organizations see improved resource management and scalability, greater flexibility across the hybrid cloud, simplified development and DevOps practices and more.

But this blending of technologies requires careful planning and configuration to drive smoother interoperability between the two platforms. This is where Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift comes in. With this, customers can preserve their investment in OpenStack APIs such as Nova, Swift, Cinder, Neutron, Keystone, etc. This allows them to lower management costs while modernizing their operational position as they mix in new container projects. This change does not force them to re-write or change their existing OpenStack workloads. To put an even finer point on this benefit, the new architecture allows them to not have to touch their OpenStack worker nodes. We will migrate their OpenStack control plane to become an OpenShift workload while not disturbing the OpenStack worker nodes. Over time, OpenStack worker nodes will continue to upgrade in line with the OpenStack lifecycle, as they have always done.

Red Hat is providing our OpenStack customers a path toward future proofing their existing investments. With Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift, organizations can realize easier installation, lightning-fast deployments and unified management from the core to the edge - three major enhancements that came directly from customer feedback. Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift will also deliver:

• Greater flexibility with the ability to run applications that are bare-metal, virtualized and containerized together — customers can run what’s best for their business, no matter where they are in their IT transformation journey;
• Fast parallel processing for swift, repeatable deployments using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and OpenShift Go Operators to reduce time, complexity and risk;
• Scalability with management through a new podified control plane (a set of tools for deploying and managing an OpenStack control plane as Kubernetes-native pods);
• Improved updates and upgrades experience using rolling updates/capabilities included in Red Hat OpenShift for a reliable and seamless method for updating podified OpenStack services while maintaining high availability;
• Better security using encrypted communications between services, encrypted memory cache and secure role based access control to deliver a higher default security model;
• Enhanced Openstack Observability helps customers gain a deeper understanding of the health of their hybrid cloud. Refreshed dashboards provide unified observability with a refined set of visualizations that are natively integrated into the Openshift Observability UI. Customers can also create their own dashboards to further refine their Observability needs.

Moving forward

Going forward, as part of its offering, Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift will be exclusively based on the next-generation form-factor, with the control plane natively hosted on Red Hat OpenShift and the external Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based dataplane managed with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17.1 is the last version of the product to use the classic form-factor of the control plane, which can be run either on bare metal or virtualized, with management provided by the OpenStack Director. Support for the classic form-factors will be available through the end of the 17.1 lifecycle (2027). Customers looking to migrate will be able to deploy their new controller to OpenShift to take over compute resources — without redeploying the running workloads.

Red Hat’s commitment to and investment in OpenStack remains strong, we are the leading contributor in commits and have more than 250 engineers continuing to lead innovation at both the project and product levels. OpenStack continues to be a vital component for large IT infrastructures, especially in the telecommunications and service-provider spaces, and this evolution will improve how these organizations deploy, manage and maintain OpenStack footprints.

*The new name is now approved but may be referred to as Red Hat OpenStack Platform 18 in the Red Hat Customer Portal. Currently shipping and supported versions of OpenStack still follow the existing branding.

The OPENSTACK logo and word mark are trademarks or registered trademarks of OpenInfra Foundation, used under license.