DEVOPSdigest

Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16.2, the latest version of its highly-scalable and agile cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform.

Designed to help organizations succeed in a hybrid cloud world, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16.2 delivers tighter integration with Red Hat OpenShift, so customers can run both new and traditional applications in parallel with improved network capacity, security features, storage, performance and efficiency.

Organizations working towards digital transformation are often faced with balancing the management of both container and virtual machine (VM) workloads - even when new applications are delivered as cloud-native. With communication service providers (CSPs) in particular, Red Hat often sees its customers and partners working to run virtualized network functions (VNFs) and cloud-native network functions (CNFs) side-by-side to achieve performance similar to that of bare-metal environments.

To help tackle this demand, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16.2 adds new capabilities for:

- A long-life, extended lifecycle allowing for continuous feature updates without the disruption or potential downtime associated with major upgrades.

- The flexibility to run VMs and cloud-native applications in parallel, and achieve bare metal performance thanks to integration between Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift, the Kubernetes platform.

- Choice and efficiency through new hardware options, including 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and other next generation x86 architectures, enabling customers to build open hybrid clouds in the manner that best suits their needs, from core architecture to hardware offloading with smartNICs.

- Simplified, easier storage by aggregating a wide variety of vendors and formats so customers can focus on application innovation and not maintaining bespoke or custom storage systems.

At the edge, application availability becomes even more of a top priority, especially when edge sites might have intermittent or unreliable network connections back to a central site. Additionally, while processing continues at edge sites, there are situations where constant connectivity with the central site is mission critical - for example, a hospital system that is fighting an outbreak. The main hospital might host the central datacenter and handle high volumes of patients from urban areas, but in order to serve the entire population, care must extend to include rural patients. Therefore those same applications must also extend to remote clinics with intermittent connectivity and limited space. Extending a hybrid environment out to where the data is needed can help teams across distributed locations make faster decisions when timing is critical.

To help better address this need, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16.2 adds availability zone awareness through Open Virtual Networking (OVN). This enables operators to set up nodes in groups, based on geographic location, power sources and potential for downtime - a schedule can then be set so that edge environments can have access to the node with the greatest availability. This helps to support remote edge sites and provide local services while also increasing performance, decreasing latency of data plane traffic and improving overall edge resiliency.