Building the Deployment Pipeline

We often tell customers that we work with OpenStack. However, it is not installed but deployed. Although the difference in words might seem subtle, it can really be a revolutionary change within an organization. Most enterprise infrastructure teams are used to the following process in the deployment of a new infrastructure platform:

1. Installing the platform
2. Configuring and integrating the platform
3. Running the platform
4. Upgrading the platform

Installing and configuring the platform can take months or years, and once it's installed, the platform is expected to run for years. Upgrades to the platform happen every 3 to 5 years, and they are large 6-12 month projects. Red Hat has structured the release of our Enterprise Linux operating system around these cycles—there were 3 years between the release of RHEL 5 and RHEL 6 and almost 4 years...