News

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16 Touts Continuous Community Innovation Stream

• By David Ramel
• 02/24/2020

The new Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16 for cloud computing includes a refined long-life support lifecycle and a commitment to continually infuse open source community innovations via stream releases.

The Red Hat platform, built on the company's Enterprise Linux 8 OS backbone, is based on the popular open source project that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, commonly deployed as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are provided to users.

In announcing Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16, last week, the company said, "The latest version of the platform adds a refined long-life support lifecycle, comprehensive feature consolidation and a new commitment to delivering continuous community innovation as enterprise-ready features via stream releases."

Community innovations might be plentiful as the open source project claims to be "one of the top three most active open source projects."

The Red Hat platform comprises the OpenStack community releases of "Rocky", "Stein" and "Train" along with the best of Red Hat OpenStack Platform versions 14 and 15, the company said.

The company's platform includes proprietary technology and tools such as Red Hat Cloudforms for management functionality, Red Hat Ceph Storage for software-defined storage, and more.

The firm's "single long-life release" is meant to let enterprises and other organizations use a platform version for up to five years. Red Hat said users can avail themselves of those aforementioned community innovations and other new features more quickly than release cadences that feature entire platform upgrades.

"With Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16, we've updated the cadence of innovation to reflect the ability and desire of enterprise IT organizations to consume and deploy new releases," VP Joe Fernandes said. "Now aligned with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, businesses can benefit from a more continuous stream of new features like edge computing and NFV without requiring a new version of the platform, helping organizations to innovate at the speed and scale that makes the most sense for their unique operations."

The release notes for the new edition provide details on new features affecting compute, network and storage.