The 11th release of OpenStack is available for download today, marking a
turning point for the open source project with contributions from nearly
1,500 developers and 169 organizations worldwide. As core of platform
matures, focus turns to interoperability in the market, raising the bar
for driver compatibility, and extending the platform to fit workloads
with bare metal and containers.
Key News Points
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Greater stability and scale across the newly defined OpenStack core
services
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First full release of the bare metal service, Ironic, for provisioning
workloads that require direct access to hardware
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More rigorous testing standards to ensure consistency across more than
100 drivers and plugin options
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New object storage support for erasure coding provides the ability to
balance density and durability based on the application
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Improved identity federation to enable hybrid and multi-cloud use cases
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Evolving development process to speed integration of technologies like
DNS, key management and containers
The Kilo release takes place at a time when production deployments
compose half of OpenStack deployments, and network functions
virtualization (NFV) is the fastest-growing use case for OpenStack cloud
software. Production deployments continue to grow, with companies like
eBay operating OpenStack at large scale.
"The ability to scale and operate efficiently is critical when you want
to offer large data center footprint via services for mission-critical
workloads. OpenStack Kilo delivers a robust set of enhancements and
tooling to deploy and operate compute, storage and networking resources
at scale. Kilo is the most robust, fully production hardened release of
OpenStack, and we’re looking forward to putting it to work," said Subbu
Allamaraju, chief engineer, cloud, eBay Inc.
As developer productivity becomes a competitive necessity for every
company, cloud technology is quickly evolving to enable that
transformation. Companies want to build on a solid cloud infrastructure
foundation that scales while providing the opportunity to embrace
emerging technologies. OpenStack Kilo is purpose-built for this
“software-defined economy,” where agile cloud resources support app
developers and software innovation further up the stack.
“OpenStack continues to grow, and features like federated identity and
bare metal provisioning support make the platform more compelling for
enterprise IT leadership and application developers who want a stable,
open source alternative to proprietary options,” said Al Sadowski,
research director, 451 Research.
New Features and Improvements to Core Projects
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Nova Compute: Kilo offers new API
versioning management with v2.1 and microversions to provide reliable,
strongly validated API definitions. This makes it easier to write
long-lived applications against compute functionality. Major
operational improvements include live upgrades when a database schema
change is required, in addition to better support for changing the
resources of a running VM.
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Swift Object Storage: Erasure coding
provides efficient and cost-effective storage, and container-level
temporary URLs allow time-limited access to a set of objects in a
container. Kilo also offers improvements to global cluster
replication, storage policy metrics and full Chinese translation.
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Cinder Block Storage: Major updates to
testing and validation requirements for backend storage systems across
70 options ensures consistency across storage choices as well as
continuous testing of functionality for all included drivers. Also,
users can now attach a volume to multiple compute instances to enable
new high-availability and migration use cases.
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Neutron Networking: The
load-balancing-as-a-service API is now in its second version.
Additional features support NFV, such as port security for
OpenVSwitch, VLAN transparency and MTU API extensions. Additional
architectural updates improve scale for future releases.
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Ironic Bare-Metal Provisioning: Kilo sees
the first full release of the Ironic bare-metal provisioning project
with support for existing VM workloads and adoption of emerging
technologies like Linux containers, platform-as-a-service and NFV.
Users can place workloads in the best environment for their
performance requirements. Ironic is already used in production
environments including Rackspace OnMetal.
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Keystone Identity Service: Identity
federation enhancements work across public and private clouds to
support hybrid workloads in multi-cloud environments.
For technical details or more information on specific project updates,
see the complete Kilo
release notes. Top contributing companies to the Kilo release
include Red Hat, HP, IBM, Mirantis, Rackspace, OpenStack Foundation,
Yahoo!, NEC, Huawei and SUSE.
Special Dedication of the Kilo Release
The OpenStack Technical Committee and contributors to the 11th release
would like to dedicate Kilo in memory of Chris Yeoh, who passed away
earlier this month. Chris contributed significantly to the OpenStack
Nova project, and his community spirit, technical contributions and
friendship will be greatly missed. In the words of OpenStack Nova PTL
Michael Still, he was “humble, helpful and honest. The OpenStack and
broader Open Source communities are poorer for his passing.” For those
who wish to contribute, donations can be made in his honor at Free
to Breathe.