Red Hat Training

A Red Hat training course is available for Red Hat OpenStack Platform

Chapter 1. Understanding Red Hat OpenStack Platform

Red Hat OpenStack Platform (RHOSP) provides the foundation to build a private or public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is a scalable, fault-tolerant platform for the development of cloud-enabled workloads.

RHOSP delivers an integrated foundation to create, deploy, and scale a secure and reliable public or private OpenStack cloud.

RHOSP is packaged so that available physical hardware can be turned into a private, public, or hybrid cloud platform that includes:

  • Fully distributed object storage
  • Persistent block-level storage
  • Virtual machine provisioning engine and image storage
  • Authentication and authorization mechanisms
  • Integrated networking
  • Web browser-based interface accessible to users and administrators

The RHOSP IaaS cloud is implemented by a collection of interacting services that control its computing, storage, and networking resources. The cloud is managed with 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.

1.1. Advantages of using Red Hat OpenStack Platform

You can use Red Hat OpenStack Platform (RHOSP) to combine virtualization, networking, and storage based on your requirements. Some of the advantages of RHOSP are as follows:

  • You can create public, private or hybrid clouds that can be scaled up or down based on your requirements.
  • You can deploy cloud-enabled workloads based on your needs and for the duration you need it.
  • You can address customer demands in hours or minutes instead of weeks or days, without sacrificing security, performance, or budget.
  • RHOSP keeps your cloud environments stable and agile by using included hybrid cloud management, monitoring, and reporting with Red Hat CloudForms.

1.2. Relationship between RDO and OpenStack Foundation

OpenStack Foundation promotes the global development, distribution and adoption of the OpenStack cloud operating system. The goal of the OpenStack Foundation is to serve developers, users, and the entire ecosystem globally by providing a set of shared resources to grow the footprint of public and private OpenStack clouds, enable technology vendors targeting the platform and assist developers in producing the best cloud software in the industry.

RPM Distribution of OpenStack (RDO) is a freely-available, community-supported distribution of the Red Hat’s flavor of OpenStack that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its derivatives, such as CentOS. RDO also makes the latest OpenStack development release available for Fedora. In addition to providing a set of software packages, RDO is also a community of users of cloud computing platform on Red Hat-based operating systems to get help and compare notes on running OpenStack. RDO aims to be the natural option for anyone that wants to run the most recently released version of OpenStack on supported systems.

If you are looking for enterprise-level support, or information on partner certification, Red Hat also offers Red Hat OpenStack Platform.