Red Hat today unveiled the development preview of OpenStack's latest generation – a combination of the vendor's OpenShift Kubernetes orchestration platform and OpenStack.

It is "the default cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) for the service provider/telecommunications space," said Sean Cohen, director of product management at Red Hat.

OpenStack Services on OpenShift is a private cloud offering that allows service providers to move their legacy 4G virtual network functions (VNFs) to 5G cloud-native function (CNF) workloads. Red Hat claims OpenStack is used by around 35% of all telco service providers, mainly on LTE networks. "If you have a cell phone in your hand, that cell phone is pretty much operat[ed] by OpenStack" on the backend, Cohen told SDxCentral.

Red Hat OpenStack has seen "great adoption" since the release of Red Hat's distribution in 2013, and "it's the same customer that we are looking to modernize" with the platform's latest update. "It's all about the workloads at the end of the day, and most of our customers have both at this point – traditional workloads alongside modernized workloads or cloud-native workloads," he said.

Although this release is the first time Red Hat has brought OpenShift and OpenStack together in a productized way, "the innovation started a long time ago," Cohen said. Many of the vendor's customers were already using OpenStack and OpenShift together, making this "the natural next step."

Compared to the OpenStack of five years ago, Red Hat has "reconstructed" the control plane and the entire deployment model of the platform "to bring it to a cloud-native state," he said. It's not a simple combination of the two platforms so much as it's a transformation of OpenStack to include more pieces of OpenShift.

To move OpenStack into an OpenShift deployment model, Red Hat used the pod mechanism of OpenShift and Kubernetes to deploy OpenStack services in a scalable, Kubernetes-native way with a built-in set of tools for managing and deploying OpenStack's podified control plane.

"When we say a podified control plane, it basically means we are now able to leverage the podification of OpenShift and Kubernetes, but for OpenStack deployment," Cohen explained.

The release represents Red Hat's shift to service-oriented deliverables for OpenStack. "But this goes beyond that," Cohen said.

He likened the new OpenStack Services to switching from a fuel-operated car to an electric one – "the engine has no more noise." In other words, service providers can manage and scale both virtualized and containerized workloads from OpenStack's container-native platform, even though deployment and orchestration are built using OpenShift.

Security is another major benefit of this service. Specifically, the platform uses end-to-end encryption for all communication to provide a "better overall delivery method with higher default security built in," Cohen said.

In terms of observability, operators are able to look at one dashboard to manage their cloud-native workload observability experience while monitoring and logging key metrics. "It's all coming together in an integrated way. ... It's not just [that] we're bringing these technologies together for the sake of simplifying deployment. This is the ability to actually help customers with their new workload needs," Cohen said.