Red Hat OpenStack Platform Life Cycle

Overview

Red Hat OpenStack Platform offers the innovation of the OpenStack community project, while also providing the security, stability, and enterprise-readiness of a platform built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat offers services for each major release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform.

• The Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift releases are offered with 4 years of Production support and the option to purchase extended lifecycle support (ELS) for the final year.
• Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17 is offered with 4 years of Production support and the option to purchase extended lifecycle support (ELS) for the final year.
• Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16 is offered with 4 years of Production support and the option to purchase extended lifecycle support (ELS) addons for additional year[s] of support.

Details

Software changes to Red Hat OpenStack Platform are delivered through individual updates known as errata advisories. These advisories are delivered through the Red Hat Customer Portal or other authorized portals. Errata advisories can be released individually on an as-needed basis or aggregated as a minor release. Errata advisories may contain security fixes (Red Hat Security Advisories or RHSAs), bug fixes (Red Hat Bug Fix Advisories or RHBAs), or feature enhancements (Red Hat Enhancement Advisories or RHEAs). All errata advisories are tested and qualified against the respective, active Red Hat OpenStack Platform major release.

All released errata advisories remain accessible to active subscribers for the entire Red Hat OpenStack Platform life cycle. Within each major release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform, any errata advisory (including one released as part of a minor release) will be applied cumulatively to the latest release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform, including any patch sets.

During the life cycle of a major release, Red Hat makes commercially reasonable efforts to maintain binary compatibility for the core runtime environment across all minor releases and errata advisories. If necessary, Red Hat may make exceptions to this compatibility goal for Critical impact security or other significant issues.

NOTE: No components of Red Hat OpenStack Platform are excluded from Extended Life Support phase.

The following table details the subscription services, including support and software maintenance, performed during each phase of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform life cycle:

Full Support:

During the Production Phase, qualified Critical and Important Security Advisories (RHSAs) and urgent and selected High Priority Bug Fix Advisories (RHBAs) will be released as they become available. Other errata advisories may be delivered as appropriate.

If available, select enhanced software functionality may be provided at the discretion of Red Hat.

Maintenance releases will also include available and qualified errata advisories (RHSAs, RHBAs, and RHEAs). Maintenance releases are cumulative and include the contents of previously released updates. The focus for minor releases during this phase lies on resolving defects of medium or higher priority.

In addition, and only during Full Support:

• Customers and Partners have the ability to request new features which are introduced upstream to be selectively backported, pending the review of Red Hat Product Management and Engineering, until the end of this phase
• The installer components may be updated until the end of this phase
• Partner may introduce new plugins to be certified with the version until the end of this phase

Maintenance Support:

Same as Full Support, excluding:

• introduction of new features through backports
• introduction of additional partner plugins

Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS):

Same as Maintenance Support, with a change of:

• Select Bug Fix Errata (RHBA) only.
• Qualified Critical and Important Security Advisories (RHSAs) only.
• Valid for existing environments only. Cannot be applied to new production installations of the product on hardware or in combination with technologies which have not been certified with the version of the product or its underlying RHEL components, as they were at the end of Maintenance Support.
• New, non-production deployments are allowed for FFU testing.
• It is required to have the valid ELS subscriptions to receive support from Red Hat.

For more information on Red Hat OpenStack Platform Extended Lifecycle Support refer to the Frequently Asked Questions document .

Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS 2):

Red Hat will provide twelve months of an additional Extended Life Support, denoted ELS Term 2, which commences at the end of the Extended Lifecycle Support phase for ELS releases.

Support through the Additional ELS Term 2 phase is an optional Add-On subscription available to Red Hat OpenStack customers. With Additional ELS Term 2, Red Hat provides:

• Select Bug Fix Errata (RHBA) only.
• Qualified Critical and Important Security Advisories (RHSAs) only.
• Valid for existing environments only. Cannot be applied to new production installations of the product on hardware or in combination with technologies which have not been certified with the version of the product or its underlying RHEL components, as they were at the end of Maintenance Support.
• New, non-production deployments are allowed for FFU testing.
• It is required to have the valid ELS 2 subscriptions to receive support from Red Hat.

For more information on Red Hat OpenStack Platform Extended Lifecycle Support refer to the Frequently Asked Questions document .

Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS 3):

Red Hat will provide twelve months of an additional Extended Life Support, denoted ELS Term 3, which commences at the end of the Extended Lifecycle Support phase for ELS Term 2 releases.

Support through the Additional ELS Term 3 phase is an optional Add-On subscription available to Red Hat OpenStack customers. With Additional ELS Term 3, Red Hat provides:

• Select Bug Fix Errata (RHBA) only.
• Qualified Critical and Important Security Advisories (RHSAs) only.
• Valid for existing environments only. Cannot be applied to new production installations of the product on hardware or in combination with technologies which have not been certified with the version of the product or its underlying RHEL components, as they were at the end of Maintenance Support.
• New, non-production deployments are allowed for FFU testing.
• It is required to have the valid ELS 3 subscriptions to receive support from Red Hat.

For more information on Red Hat OpenStack Platform Extended Lifecycle Support refer to the Frequently Asked Questions document .

Red Hat OpenStack Platform director

Our official deployment and management tool is part of Red Hat OpenStack Platform release and therefore it has same support criteria as the core product.

For detailed information relating to the Red Hat OpenStack Platform director, see the Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director Life Cycle support policy page.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform Upgrade Policy

Customers have the option of in-place upgrades as well as parallel migrations.

Red Hat provides a Framework for Upgrades for in-place major version upgrades.

For a parallel migration with minimal additional hardware (currently estimated as 1 undercloud node, 3 controller nodes, and 2 compute nodes), Red Hat engineers have collaborated on the os-migrate open-source tool. Given the many options available for parallel migrations, support for this is provided by Red Hat as part of a Consulting engagement. Note that some outage will be required for the cloud workloads being migrated.

Life Cycle Dates

Red Hat Openstack Services on Openshift

Red Hat Openstack Platform

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version Support

Each Red Hat OpenStack Platform version supports only one Major.Minor release version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux including all asynchronous update releases. As such while you may continue to use existing versions, you must update to the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux minor release to continue to consume new bug fix and security errata.

Red Hat Container Platforms support for Red Hat Openstack Services on OpenShift

Support of the RHOSO control plane is supported on the below versions of OpenShift, but only up to the 2 year timeframe that includes “OpenShift Extended Update Support," but Term 2 is not supported. See the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Life Cycle Policy page

Red Hat OpenStack Platform Support Policies

View more details regarding Red Hat OpenStack Platform Support Policies.