Red Hat has launched the latest version of its cloud platform, which it said would provide "a clear path" for organisations building an open hybrid cloud.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 4.0 is built on Red Hat's OpenStack Havana codebase, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5, and the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor. The Havana codebase debuted in October.

The latest update to the platform sports a number important new features. Among them is OpenStack Heat which provides a template-based orchestration engine to quickly provision a broad range of infrastructure resources, from new compute nodes and application virtual machines, to specifying disk volumes, networks, security groups, and more.

It also includes Ceilometer which collects and stores OpenStack resource metering and usage data. It also provides data query services for use with the enterprise operational support systems (OSS) and billing support systems (BSS) that are commonly deployed by service providers.

In addition to the core parts of the Havana codebase is the addition of the open source Foreman lifecycle management tool for provisioning of both physical and virtual infrastructure resources. This supports the deployment and expansion process through remote physical servers and a graphical user interface that provides a real-time global view of system resources.

It also integrates with Red Hat CloudForms. this technology offers a unified management interface for Red Hat and non-Red Hat datacentre virtualisation offerings, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

There is also integration with Red Hat's Gluster-based Storage Server to provide OpenStack Object Storage (Swift), OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder) and OpenStack Image Service (Glance).

The features are all tied together with an optimised version for Red Hat Enterprise Linux the firm launched in November. The vendor said that it will support Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 4.0 for an extended enterprise life cycle of eighteen months, compared to the six-month release cadence of community OpenStack.

During this eighteen-month lifecycle, Red Hat will offer security and bug fixes, performance enhancements, and the back-porting of some additional features from future releases, providing stability to the production environment that customers have established, the vendor said.