Red Hat Previews OpenStack Integration With OpenShift Platform
Red Hat today made available a preview of an instance of the OpenStack framework tightly integrated with the control plane used to manage Red Hat OpenShift environments based on Kubernetes clusters.
Maria Bracho, currently CTO for Latin America at Red Hat and formerly senior manager for Hybrid Cloud Platforms at Red Hat, said Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift, formerly known as Red Hat OpenStack Platform 18, sets the stage for centralizing the management of both OpenStack and Red Hat OpenShift and enables IT teams to preserve their investments in existing tools while lowering their total cost.
For example, IT teams that have invested in open source Nova software to provision virtual machines will be able to continue to do so while taking advantage of Red Hat OpenShift to orchestrate the overall environment, she noted.
The goal is to reduce complexity and cost by eliminating the need for the Tripleo control plane that many organizations rely on today to manage OpenStack environments, said Bracho. Support for the existing control plane will be provided through 2027.
At the same time, Red Hat is also moving to incorporate the Ansible automation framework to streamline workflows and add built-in observability tools.
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 all but over, said Bracho.
OpenStack, of course, is already widely used 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 any IT framework overnight, so OpenStack and Kubernetes clusters must coexist for the foreseeable future, noted Bracho.
In fact, Red Hat anticipates new use cases for OpenStack will open up as the underlying infrastructure used to deploy it becomes more modernized, she added.
It may still be a while before OpenStack and Kubernetes clusters are fully integrated within production environments. But as many organizations reevaluate their commitment to more proprietary frameworks for managing virtual machines and clusters, it’s clear there is more interest in keeping all options open. In the meantime, regardless of the economic climate, there is always going to be interest in reducing the total cost and overall level of friction involved in managing diverse IT environments at scale.
