DENVER – Red Hat has delivered distributed compute node (DCN) capabilities within its OpenStack Platform in a move to help customers build an open edge computing architecture. The vendor said this will allow for more consistent, centralized management and less operational overhead from the core out to the edge.
Red Hat’s OpenStack Platform 13 allows for central management of edge deployments using the same tools that manage core OpenStack deployments. It also supports a smaller OpenStack footprint at resource-constrained edge environments. This includes the ability to run in as little as one node at an edge location. And in terms of 5G services, the edge location can better support low-latency services.
Sandro Mazziotta, director of NFV product management at Red Hat, explained that the timing of this update aligns with what the vendor is seeing from its customers that are looking to push OpenStack support out toward the edge of network deployments. He noted this was becoming especially important for telco operators deploying 5G networks.
“If you asked me six months ago, I would have said it was a 2020 agenda item,” Mazziotta said during an interview at this week’s Open Infrastructure Show. “Now we are being asked by our customers to be ready for the second half of this year.”
Mazziotta said that OpenStack is an ideal platform for handling this level of management, but that it also positions the vendor for a longer-term move toward more containerized deployments.
“It’s a tricky agenda,” he said, noting that for 5G, most of the workloads will eventually be packaged as cloud native. He explained that Kubernetes has helped fill in some of this gap, but there remains a maturity challenge for Kubernetes in these large telco environments.
OpenStack and/or Kubernetes
“Using OpenStack and running containers in [virtual machines] is not a beautiful solution,” Mazziotta said. “But its pragmatic at this point to get to market.” He added that most of Red Hat’s larger customers are looking at massive 5G rollouts next year that will run on top of container platforms. “It’s a big bet, but it aligns with the industry looking to package everything as a container,” Mazziotta said.
Red Hat currently offers its OpenStack platform alongside its Kubernetes-based OpenShift platform. Mazziotta said that OpenStack was the bigger talking point a year ago, but that has since changed to OpenShift as operators see the management potential of Kubernetes.
That integration of OpenStack and Kubernetes was a central theme to the Airship project that this week released its 1.0 iteration. Mazziotta said that while Red Hat “loves” Airship as a concept, it has a slightly different view on how this OpenStack-Kubernetes integration should be constructed. More on that is expected to be announced at the Red Hat Summit event next week.
Virtualization GA
Red Hat this week also launched general availability of Virtualization 4.3, which is a Red Hat Kernel-based virtual machine (KVM)-powered virtualization platform.
Red Hat Virtualization is an open software-defined platform for virtualizing Linux and Microsoft Windows workloads. The latest updates expand SDN support for the latest Red Hat OpenStack Platforms, including version’s 12, 13, and 14; end-to-end automated configuration, deployment, and validation using the Red Hat Ansible Automation platform; and support for IBM’s latest Power9 VM architecture.
That latest point is appropriate as IBM is in the process of closing its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat that it announced last October. That deal is set to boost IBM’s presence in the open source software and cloud native space.