Red Hat Extends Commitment to Integrate OpenStack and K8s

June 13, 2023June 13, 2023 Mike Vizard 5G, kubernetes, open source, Openshift, red hat

At the OpenInfra Summit today, Red Hat announced that, in addition to supporting the latest iteration of the open source OpenStack, it is extending Red Hat OpenShift’s management reach to add support for 5G networks with the release of version 17.1 of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform.

Last year, Red Hat added a simpler way to deploy the control plane for OpenStack cloud framework on Red Hat OpenShift, its curated distribution of Kubernetes, in 4G environments.

Maria Bracho, principal product manager for OpenStack at Red Hat, said because OpenStack can already be deployed as a set of containers, it becomes possible to orchestrate that environment using Kubernetes. Previously, the control plane would have been deployed on virtual machines that collectively consume more infrastructure resources. Red Hat is now providing a method to cut the time to deploy the OpenStack control plane in half using a Kubernetes cluster. That way, it remains compatible with the TripleO management framework that the OpenStack community created, she noted.

The overall goal is to streamline life cycle management across the entire OpenStack environment, added Bracho.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17.1 also streamlines the upgrade process by adding support for multiple versions of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platform along with logical volume management partitioning to create short-lived snapshots and, when necessary, revert functions.

In addition, Red Hat has extended the domain name system-as-a-service (DNSaaS), dubbed Designate, to add integration with Bind9, an open source implementation of DNS, support for Open Virtual Networking (OVN), an open source virtual networking overlay based on Open vSwitch software and the Octavia load balancer created by the OpenStack community that supports both containers and virtual machines.

Other added capabilities include support for role-based access controls (RBAC), FIPS-140 (ISO/IEC 19790) compatibility, identity management federation via OpenID Connect and Fernet tokens to better secure confidential information.

While the relationship between OpenStack and Kubernetes hasn’t always been well understood, Bracho said more organizations now view the two platforms as symbiotic. Most organizations today deploy Kubernetes clusters on top of some type of virtual machine infrastructure to better ensure isolation. As such, the ‘religious war’ that erupted early on between advocates of Kubernetes and OpenStack is over, said Bracho.

OpenStack, of course, is already widely employed to manage virtual machine environments, so many orchestrations have a vested interest in extending the reach of those investments into cloud-native application environments. The OpenStack Foundation has been promoting Linux, OpenStack, Kubernetes, Infrastructure (LOKI) as an open standard to bridge the gap between cloud-native and traditional workloads. Telecommunications carriers, especially, have made massive investments in OpenStack and are among the forefront of organizations that have embraced LOKI.

Kubernetes, one way or another, is going to become more integrated with OpenStack. The issue now is determining which elements of the OpenStack framework should be deployed on what types of infrastructure with the least amount of disruption possible. After all, there are very few organizations that can afford to rip and replace an IT framework overnight.