Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12: What Was Announced

At the OpenStack Summit Sydney 2017, Red Hat announced Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12, the latest version of its enterprise-grade cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering. Built on the upstream OpenStack Pike release, this version brought a significant set of enhancements targeting operational flexibility, security, networking, and developer velocity.

The platform continues to be built on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and is designed to support both private and public cloud infrastructure deployments. Red Hat positioned it as a tested, certified, and fully-supported distribution of OpenStack capable of scaling to meet enterprise demand without sacrificing availability, performance, or security compliance.

Key Features and Changes in OpenStack Platform 12

Containerized OpenStack Services

The most significant architectural change in version 12 is the containerization of OpenStack services. Red Hat enabled users to run most OpenStack control-plane services inside Linux containers, improving upgrade flexibility and reducing the blast radius of individual service failures. Certain networking and storage services were offered as a containerized Technology Preview at release time, indicating they were functional but not yet fully production-supported.

This move aligned with Red Hat’s broader enterprise container strategy and reflected growing demand from operators who wanted container-native lifecycle management for their infrastructure services—not just for their application workloads.

Security Enhancements

Red Hat expanded the security capabilities of OpenStack Platform 12 in several areas:

• Volume encryption support was added to OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder), helping organizations protect data at rest.
• Disk partitioning enhancements were introduced in the Bare Metal Provisioning service (Ironic).
• Automated lifecycle management for TLS/security certificates reduced the manual overhead of maintaining a secure PKI posture across the cluster.
• Red Hat also announced a new Red Hat Security Guide to help operators implement baseline security controls and meet compliance requirements.

Composable Networks and Networking Improvements

OpenStack Platform 12 introduced composable networks, giving operators the ability to define custom network topologies with fewer architectural constraints. Red Hat also removed the previous upper limit on the number of networks that could be configured, enabling large-scale deployments—including support for L3 spine-and-leaf topologies commonly used in modern data centers.

The release also extended the Technology Preview of OpenDaylight, an open-source Software-Defined Networking (SDN) controller. OpenDaylight provides modular, programmable network control and adds broader support for Network Function Virtualization (NFV) use cases, which is particularly relevant for telecom and edge workloads.

Automation and Infrastructure Enrollment

Red Hat added automation for infrastructure enrollment services, reducing the manual steps required to bring new nodes into an OpenStack cluster. Combined with the automated certificate lifecycle management, these changes aimed to cut operational toil and improve the consistency of deployments at scale.

Upgraded Distributed Continuous Integration (DCI)

Red Hat’s Distributed Continuous Integration (DCI) system received a notable upgrade in this release. The updated DCI automatically delivers actionable logs to Red Hat’s quality engineering teams, accelerating the identification, patching, and upstream contribution of fixes. This tightens the feedback loop between partner hardware labs and Red Hat’s engineering processes, which is especially valuable for operators running certified hardware configurations.

Integrated Components

OpenStack Platform 12 continued to ship with two key integrated components:

• Red Hat CloudForms — for multi-cloud management, governance, and chargeback.
• Red Hat Ceph Storage — providing tightly integrated software-defined storage for OpenStack volumes, objects, and images.

Availability

At the time of the announcement, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 was scheduled to become available in the weeks following the summit via the Red Hat Customer Portal. It was also offered as a component of the Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure and Red Hat Cloud Suite subscription solutions.

Context: Why This Release Mattered

The containerization of OpenStack services was the defining architectural shift in Platform 12. Traditionally, OpenStack services ran directly on host operating systems, making in-place upgrades complex and risky. Moving services into containers opened the door to more predictable upgrade paths and better isolation between components—a direction the upstream OpenStack community had been pursuing and that Red Hat was now delivering in a supported enterprise form.

The networking improvements, particularly composable networks and removal of network count limits, also addressed real pain points for large-scale operators who had previously needed to work around platform constraints when designing their physical and virtual network topologies.