Red Hat has launched a community version of its still-in-development OpenStack distribution, and it also released a preview of the enterprise edition of this distribution for those who sign up for an early adopter program.
In much the same way the community driven Fedora Linux tests many of the software programs and utilities that make their way into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), so too will this new OpenStack distribution, which Red Hat calls RDO, serve as a proving ground for technologies that may be included in Red Hat's enterprise OpenStack distribution.
And like with Fedora, Red Hat is hoping to build a community of developers and users around RDO. The company announced the new community edition at the OpenStack Spring Conference, being held in Portland this week. OpenStack is a collection of open source software designed to offer compute, storage and networking services on an on-demand basis, often called IaaS (infrastructure as a service).
RDO runs on RHEL, Fedora, and other distributions based on RHEL. It includes the core OpenStack components, namely Nova, Glance, Keystone, Cinder, Quantum, Swift, and Horizon. It also comes with a number of new tools still in development, such the Heat cloud application orchestration application, and the Ceilometer resource monitoring and metering utility. Red Hat also created a new installation tool for RDO, called PackStack.
Going forward, RDO will be updated with upstream OpenStack changes as they appear. "As every milestone and every release [is issued] and when key features are released, RDO will put those in the hands of developers and end-users," said Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens, during a webcast about the distribution.
In addition to RDO, Red Hat has issued a full enterprise release of what will become its first commercially supported OpenStack package. For those participating in the Red Hat Early Adopter Program, this distribution is available at no cost for a 90 day evaluation. It is based on the OpenStack Folsom version, released last September, and is expected to be generally available in July.
Red Hat also launched its OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network, which the company plans to build into a directory of companies that provide Red Hat-based Open Stack services.
Red Hat estimates that it is the largest contributor to the newest version of OpenStack, Grizzly, which was released this month.
