The 11th release of OpenStack is available for download now, 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 servers and containers.
OpenStack Kilo is purpose-built for the “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 the OpenStack Core Projects:
- Nova Compute – Kilo offers new API versioning management with v2.1 and microversions to provide reliable, strongly validated API definitions. This would make 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.
