Red Hat Launching Its Own Community Distro of OpenStack 25
darthcamaro writes "Red Hat still doesn't have a fully supported commercial version of OpenStack in the market yet (coming this summer) as it lags behind Ubuntu and SUSE. But Red Hat is doing something no other distro vendor has done, they are launching a brand new bleeding edge build of OpenStack that will update weekly (or faster). The best part? This isn't a fork. It's all upstream work, meaning everyone in the OpenStack Community benefits. From the article: '"Our developers will continue to work in the upstream OpenStack, and "whenever we find we need to make changes to make RDO work, we get that work done upstream first," Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens said. "RDO won't change in any way our active involvement in the upstream OpenStack development."'
What is OpenStack? (Score:5, Informative)
OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich. The technology consists of a series of interrelated projects delivering various components for a cloud infrastructure solution.
Who's behind OpenStack? Founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA, OpenStack has grown to be a global software community of developers collaborating on a standard and massively scalable open source cloud operating system. Our mission is to enable any organization to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware.
Who uses OpenStack? Corporations, service providers, VARS, SMBs, researchers, and global data centers looking to deploy large-scale cloud deployments for private or public clouds leveraging the support and resulting technology of a global open source community.
Why open matters: All of the code for OpenStack is freely available under the Apache 2.0 license. Anyone can run it, build on it, or submit changes back to the project. We strongly believe that an open development model is the only way to foster badly-needed cloud standards, remove the fear of proprietary lock-in for cloud customers, and create a large ecosystem that spans cloud providers.
Re:"Doing something no other distro vendor has don (Score:4, Informative)
Red Hat is doing something no other distro vendor has done
... Gentoo [gentoo.org]? And Daniel Robbins' Funtoo [funtoo.org] project?
These two distros are very similar, with a few key differences but in both you can choose how stable or not stable you would like. If you want stable, you can have stable. If you need bleeding edge, you can have bleeding edge.
Granted its not "automatic updates" but I don't like the idea of my server doing updates like that without me initiating them.
The point is that RDO isn't a new distro, or a specific RH flavour of OpenStack, but just plain vanilla OpenStack builds, nicely packed in RPM's and with a "yum" repository. So RH based distros like Fedora 18, CentOS, Scientific Linux can install and maintain it, just by enabling the RDO yum repo.
There is a quickstart guide and lots of documentation here:
http://openstack.redhat.com/Quickstart [redhat.com]
All in all, this makes it really easy to test and play around with OpenStack.