Chapter 1. Product Introduction
1.1. Overview
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform provides the foundation to build a private or public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It offers a massively scalable, fault-tolerant platform for the development of cloud-enabled workloads.
The current Red Hat system is based on OpenStack Icehouse, and packaged so that available physical hardware can be turned into a private, public, or hybrid cloud platform including:
- Fully distributed object storage
- Persistent block-level storage
- Virtual-machine provisioning engine and image storage
- Authentication and authorization mechanism
- Integrated networking
- Web browser-based GUI for both users and administration.
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform IaaS cloud is implemented by a collection of interacting services that control its computing, storage, and networking resources. The cloud is managed using a web-based interface which allows administrators to control, provision, and automate OpenStack resources. Additionally, the OpenStack infrastructure is facilitated through an extensive API, which is also available to end users of the cloud.