Red Hat Enables OpenStack to Run Natively on OpenShift Platform

Red Hat this week made generally available an instance of the open-source OpenStack framework that runs natively on Kubernetes clusters.

Sean Cohen, director of product management in the Red Hat Hybrid Platforms unit, said Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift makes it possible for IT teams to orchestrate the various components of an OpenStack framework for monolithic applications as a set of microservices that run alongside other cloud-native applications.

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That capability makes it possible to, for example, use the OpenStack control plane to manage Kubernetes pods running on Red Hat OpenShift in addition to taking advantage of tools to unify observability across both platforms, noted Cohen.

In addition, IT teams using Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift, also known as Red Hat OpenStack Platform 18, will be able to deploy compute nodes four times faster than they could using the previous version 17.1 of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform.

Overall, these capabilities will reduce the total cost of managing a hybrid application portfolio while enabling organizations to accelerate the pace at which changes can be made to those environments, said Cohen. IT teams will be able to now deploy OpenShift in as little as three minutes, he added.

In addition, IT teams will be able to take advantage of the Red Hat implementation of the open-source Ansible framework to automate workflows, noted Cohen. IT teams will also be able to leverage Red Hat Lightspeed for OpenShift, a set of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools that Red Hat is advancing in collaboration with IBM.

Red Hat is making a case for unifying the management of monolithic and microservices-based applications using tools such as Kubevirt to encapsulate kernel-based virtual machines (KVMs). OpenStack furthers that effort by adding a management framework that can now be more easily consumed as individual microservices rather than requiring IT teams to deploy every OpenStack component, noted Cohen.

Additionally, Red Hat is using those combined capabilities to entice customers on rival platforms such as VMware virtual machines to migrate to KVMs that can be more easily managed alongside containers on the Red Hat OpenShift platform.

It’s not clear what many IT organizations are migrating monolithic applications to KVMs that are encapsulated on Kubernetes clusters, but as more organizations look to reduce the total cost of IT an argument can be made for centralization. Rather than having separate teams to manage multiple platforms, OpenStack running on Kubernetes makes it easier to, for example, centralize the management of monolithic and microservices-based applications under the auspices of a platform engineering team.

Regardless of motivation, long-standing tensions between proponents of OpenStack and Kubernetes appear to be going by the wayside as it becomes easier to integrate them. The challenge now is determining to what degree to rely on OpenStack to manage virtual machines and Kubernetes pods versus relying on it to, for example, provide microservices-based applications with access to a wider range of existing networking and storage services.

One way or another, especially in sectors such as telecommunications where usage of OpenStack is rife, IT teams now have more options than ever.