News

Red Hat OpenStack 16 Goes GA

• By John K. Waters
• February 20, 2020

Red Hat today announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16, the latest version of its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution. This release adds more than 1,000 enhancements and new features, the company said, including a refined long-life support lifecycle, comprehensive feature consolidation, and a new commitment to delivering continuous community innovation as enterprise-ready features via stream releases. 

This update lays "the foundation for enterprise and telco workloads from programmable IaaS for hybrid clouds, developer clouds, and production clouds, as well as cloud-native applications, such as network functions virtualization (NFV), edge computing, AI, and machine learning," the company said

This release marks an update of the release cadence to align with the underlying Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, said Joe Fernandes, vice president of products in Red Hat's Cloud Platforms group, in an effort to "reflect the ability and desire of enterprise IT organizations to consume and deploy new releases." The result is fewer platform updates, which reduces the time spent testing and certifying applications.

The new "long-life cadence" of Red Hat OpenStack Platform is meant to allow organizations to standardize and remain on a single version of the platform for up to five years, the company said. Customers will have access to features faster, without having to wait for complete platform upgrades. The new pace "blends an organization's need for a consistent platform with the open source community's speed of innovation."

OpenStack is the most widely deployed open-source software for building and managing public and private clouds, and one of the fastest growing open-source projects in history. It was launched in 2010 as a joint project of cloud solutions provider Rackspace and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). It was later released to open source under an Apache License, and is now managed by the non-profit OpenStack Foundation. More than 500 companies have joined the project, including Cisco, Dell EMC, HPE, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, Lenovo, NetApp, Nuage, NVIDIA, among others.

Built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, Red Hat's commercially supported version is among the leading OpenStack distributions. The latest release combines the OpenStack community releases of "Rocky, "Stein," and "Train," along with the features from Red Hat OpenStack Platform versions 14 and 15. Modular by design, the platform optimizes IT operations for existing traditional applications, while serving as the foundation for cloud-native app development and deployment.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16 is available now via the Customer Portal for Red Hat OpenStack Platform customers with active subscriptions.