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

• Greater stability and scale across the newly defined OpenStack core services
• First full release of the bare metal service, Ironic, for provisioning workloads that require direct access to hardware
• More rigorous testing standards to ensure consistency across more than 100 drivers and plugin options
• New object storage support for erasure coding provides the ability to balance density and durability based on the application
• Improved identity federation to enable hybrid and multi-cloud use cases
• 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

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.