Commercially supported distributions

Although there are only three major community-supported distributions of OpenStack available, there are a myriad of commercially-supported distributions available. A list of these distributions and their certification status is available at: http://openstack.org. Distributions that have passed specific load and performance-based tempest tests are certified in the same way as managed service providers. Commercially supported distributions are frequently based on the community-supported distributions. However, there are a few reasons that organizations prefer them to the community distributions.

The first major driver is support. Most companies that provide support for OpenStack require the customer to use their commercially supported distribution so that they can ensure that the customer is using software that has passed through a certification and testing process. For example, Red Hat takes the packages from each RDO release and runs them through a detailed test plan before releasing them as a Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack platform. When a customer identifies an issue with a particular OpenStack component, Red Hat can add that issue to the test plan to prevent regressions in future releases. In addition, customers may choose different commercial distributions for ease of use, quality of support, or any additional software that may be included with the distribution.

Organizations may also choose a commercially supported distribution over a community- supported distribution because the distribution has added functionality that hasn't been released by the distributor as open source. These enhancements tend to be aimed towards speeding up the deployment of OpenStack clouds or improving the manageability of deployments with additional reporting and dashboards.