Originally reported by The Next Platform (nextplatform.com). This article summarizes and expands on that reporting for a DevOps engineering audience.
Red Hat Brings Containers and Kubernetes to Its OpenStack Distribution
At the OpenStack Summit in Sydney, Australia in November 2017, Red Hat announced Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12, a significant release that containerizes the majority of OpenStack services using Kubernetes. The move reflects a broader industry trend toward treating infrastructure components as containerized workloads rather than monolithic, bare-metal or VM-hosted processes.
Red Hat is well-positioned to make this shift. Its engineers have been central contributors to container ecosystem tooling, and the company’s OpenShift Container Platform — built on Kubernetes and Docker — has been one of the most widely deployed enterprise Kubernetes distributions. OpenShift 3.0 formalized that Kubernetes-native approach, and subsequent releases, including OpenShift Container Platform 3.6 (launched in September 2017), added enhanced security features and improved consistency across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Why Containerize OpenStack Services?
Containerizing OpenStack services is not a new idea. As far back as 2015, eBay was running Kubernetes and containers within its OpenStack infrastructure to manage large-scale cloud operations. The upstream OpenStack community has also pursued this direction through projects like:
- Kolla – provides production-ready containers and deployment tools for operating OpenStack clouds.
- Magnum – an OpenStack API service that makes container orchestration engines (like Kubernetes and Docker Swarm) first-class resources in OpenStack.
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 takes this upstream work and integrates it into a supported enterprise distribution. The practical benefits cited by Red Hat include:
- Easier scaling of individual OpenStack services without redeploying the full stack.
- Reduced operational complexity through standardized container lifecycle management.
- Faster upgrades by updating individual service containers rather than full-host package updates.
- Better isolation between services, improving fault containment.
Radhesh Balakrishnan, General Manager of OpenStack at Red Hat, framed the release as part of a larger enterprise modernization effort to “better support the next generation of applications that take advantage of multiple hardware architectures, Linux container technologies and cloud computing.”
Key Features of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12
Based on the upstream OpenStack “Pike” release, Platform 12 delivers improvements across containerization, security, networking, and composable infrastructure.
1. Containerized OpenStack Services
Most core OpenStack services are containerized in this release. Networking and storage services are offered as a containerized Technology Preview, meaning they are available for evaluation but not yet fully supported for production workloads.
2. Composable Networks
Red Hat has progressively expanded composable infrastructure support across recent OpenStack Platform releases:
- Platform 10 introduced customizable service profiles, allowing operators to tailor individual service deployments.
- Platform 11 made deployment and upgrade workflows more adaptable.
- Platform 12 adds composable networks, enabling operators to define their own network topology rather than selecting from predefined configurations.
This includes support for L3 spine-and-leaf topologies, which are common in large data center environments. Users can now create any number of networks suited to their specific physical infrastructure layout.
Platform 12 also adds support for the Redfish API, defined by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), enabling interoperability with composable infrastructure solutions such as Intel’s Rack Scale Design.
3. Security Enhancements
- Automated infrastructure enrollment service for lifecycle management of security certificates.
- Updated volume encryption support in OpenStack Block Storage.
- Improved disk partitioning capabilities in bare-metal provisioning.
- A new security guide available in Red Hat’s customer portal to assist with understanding and implementing security controls.
4. OpenDaylight SDN Integration
Red Hat extended its Technology Preview of OpenDaylight integration in Platform 12. OpenDaylight is an open-source software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) platform. Deeper integration enables more programmable, automated network management within OpenStack environments.
5. Distributed Continuous Integration (DCI) Improvements
Red Hat’s DCI technology, first introduced in its OpenStack distribution approximately five years prior to this release, automates deployment, testing, and the customer feedback loop. In Platform 12, DCI was updated to deliver actionable logs automatically to Red Hat’s quality engineering teams, shortening the cycle for identifying, patching, and releasing fixes.
Target Use Cases and Availability
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 targets both private and public cloud IaaS deployments. It was made available through:
- Red Hat’s customer portal.
- As a component of Red Hat’s Cloud Infrastructure and Cloud Suite subscription offerings.
Context: Containers in OpenStack vs. OpenStack for Containers
It is worth clarifying a distinction that often causes confusion in this space:
- Containers in OpenStack (this release) means running OpenStack’s own control-plane services — Nova, Neutron, Cinder, Keystone, etc. — as containers managed by Kubernetes, rather than as packages installed directly on host operating systems.
- OpenStack for Containers (Magnum, Zun) means using OpenStack as the underlying infrastructure layer to provision and manage container clusters for application workloads.
Platform 12 focuses primarily on the former: making the OpenStack control plane itself more cloud-native and operationally manageable through containerization.
Summary
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 represents a meaningful architectural shift in how enterprise OpenStack deployments can be operated. By containerizing core services with Kubernetes, introducing composable networking, extending SDN integration with OpenDaylight, and hardening security automation, Red Hat aimed to give operators the flexibility and operational tooling needed to run OpenStack at scale while aligning with modern DevOps and cloud-native practices.