Akanda, the major contributor and supporter of the recently launched OpenStack
Project Astara,
today announced Astara's Liberty release at OpenStack Summit Tokyo. The
new version now available to OpenStack operators is the open source
network orchestration platform's most substantial since its initial
launch, and is Astara's first since becoming an official OpenStack
project.
Astara's Liberty
release gives OpenStack operators a vendor-agnostic network
orchestration platform for layer 3 through 7 network services that
radically simplifies the complexity and scale of Neutron
implementations. The production-proven OpenStack project fully negates
the need for multiple plugins and SDN controllers. By orchestrating
network functions from different providers on bare metal, VMs, and
containers, Astara provides unprecedented flexibility, agility, and
stability to OpenStack cloud developers and service providers.
What's new in Astara's Liberty release?- More configurability: A
new load balancer driver allows OpenStack operators to configure the
platform to load and manage only the resources they choose. Current
implementations include NGINX and NGINX Plus.
- Quicker provisioning: Neutron
resources are now much more quickly provisioned onto appliance VMs via a
new service that manages pools of hot-standby appliance VMs.
- Cumulus Networks integration: Tight
integration and support for Dynamic Lightweight Network Virtualization
gives OpenStack operators a complete, OpenStack-ready stack.
- Higher availability: Active-active high availability and scaling improvements.
- Full compatibility with Liberty: Astara
is synced to Liberty's global requirements, ensuring smooth
installation into system namespaces shared by other OpenStack projects.
- Full compatibility with Kilo and Juno: For clouds running OpenStack Kilo or Juno, the new Astara release can be completely backported.
"Astara's
first release as an official OpenStack project is an exciting one for
OpenStack operators," said Henrik Rosendahl, CEO, Akanda. "The goal of
Astara is to make Networking and DevOps' lives easier. With tremendous
community support and momentum for the platform throughout its first
year, Astara is the answer for massively simplified OpenStack networking
stack that can replace traditional - and expensive - single vendor
lock-in."
"As an operator of
OpenStack, it's fantastic to see new open source projects like Astara
extend and simplify the platform," said Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost
and OpenStack Foundation board member. "The Liberty release of
OpenStack demonstrates the power of the big tent approach to offering
choice and operating efficiency for delivering a 100% open source cloud
to end users and customers."