Akanda is announcing today that its platform for simplifying OpenStack networking has been designated an official OpenStack Foundation project. The Akanda OpenStack project has been renamed Astara; Akanda will continue to provide development resources to the project, along with commercial subscriptions and enterprise support to customers and partners. With networking the final - and most complex - major component to be considered in OpenStack clouds, Astara now gives OpenStack operators drastic networking simplification and agility that is unmatched by traditional network vendors.   

Astara is providing OpenStack operators a vendor agnostic network orchestration platform that uniquely addresses the complex nature and scale of Neutron implementations. Astara does this by negating OpenStack operators' needs for complex SDN controllers, overlays, and multiple plugins for cloud networking. Instead, the new OpenStack project simplifies many of the daily operations common to OpenStack operators by providing a sophisticated lifecycle management and orchestration platform to monitor, configure, and manage network services (routing, firewall, load balancing) in multi-tenant OpenStack environments. Astara is layer-2 agnostic and designed to work with the existing network, not replace it.

"We're excited for what it will mean to have the newly-minted Astara project under the full control of the OpenStack Foundation," said Mark McClain, fmr. Neutron PTL and Chief Technology Officer, Akanda. "Demand has grown for a new way to simplify OpenStack networking via multi-vendor networking services, and Astara is that platform. We will continue to work closely with the OpenStack community to offer support and contributions towards finally creating a hardware-vendor neutral open networking stack. We expect the community will like how quickly they can contribute to Astara, and OpenStack users will like how seamlessly they can implement the platform into their own clouds."

"We welcome Astara as an official OpenStack project," said Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director at the OpenStack Foundation. "The OpenStack community grows stronger every day, and Astara brings exciting new network capabilities for an end to end open source cloud."

Project Astara - formerly Akanda - has been an open source project for three years originating from DreamHost with the core development work done by key contributors to OpenStack Neutron. The first supported release was made available in May 2015, with the second release slated for availability at the OpenStack Summit Tokyo in late October.