UKCloud has announced a major upgrade to its entire Cloud Native Infrastructure platform to support the 13th release of OpenStack, Mitaka, making it the first UK public sector public cloud provider to run at this release level. UKCloud supports OpenStack in order to help its UK public sector customers comply with government policy stating that open standards must be used when procuring ICT and delivering any new ICT solutions, ensuring that all government ICT assets are inter-operable.
UKCloud’s Cloud Native Infrastructure (powered by OpenStack) is designed to support the public sector as it continues to digitise services. Supporting this newer release of OpenStack gives UKCloud’s platform even greater functionality, helping developers create cloud native applications which are agile, innovative and cost effective and not locked in to a single cloud provider.
“OpenStack perfectly complements our agile and assured platform; this latest upgrade will help us to deliver scalable public cloud services, offering greater manageability and an enhanced end-user experience,” said Simon Hansford, CEO of UKCloud. “OpenStack Mitaka brings considerable performance improvements to platform orchestration via its HEAT service, these improvements allow OpenStack to scale faster to and be more agile when managing dynamic cloud workloads. These enhancements will play a vital role in the continued digital transformation in the UK public sector.”
UKCloud has also become a corporate sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation, demonstrating the company’s commitment to both OpenStack and open source. UKCloud’s platform has also passed the OpenStack Interoperability test to prove its openness and compatibility with the ecosystem, along with rigorous security testing (CHECK testing) against the high standards set by the UK government's National Technical Authority for Information Assurance (CESG), dispelling the myth that open source software presents a greater security risk due to its collaborative nature.
UKCloud is also evolving its partner ecosystem, collaborating with Red Hat to enable its suite of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat CloudForms services to integrate with UKCloud’s pre-existing Red Hat OpenStack Platform deployment. This will enable developers to more quickly develop, host, and scale applications in a managed cloud environment.
Hansford added: “The public sector is adopting more and more cloud solutions each year, and we’re seeing increasingly complex requirements for big data projects and multi-cloud deployments starting to emerge. Our support of the next generation of OpenStack will help our public sector customers to realise innovative projects in the cloud, while complying with government policy concerning open standards.”
The new release of OpenStack provides developers with granular role based access control of networks and enables UKCloud’s platform to fully integrate with a variety of specialised private government networks, such as the research and education network, Janet; the Restricted LAN Interconnect (RLI); the Public Services Network (PSN) and N3 healthcare communities.
