The OpenStack community has released Pike, the 16th version of this widely deployed open source infrastructure software – with a focus on manageability, composability and scale. The latest release comes with new delivery models like private-cloud-as-a-service.
With new delivery models like private-cloud-as-a-service, it would be easier than ever to adopt OpenStack through the open source ecosystem – where users are not locked into a proprietary technology or single vendor. The software now powers 60 public cloud availability zones and more than a thousand private clouds running across more than five million physical cores.
“The features and upgrades that Pike brings are the lessons of experience you get from enabling thousands of public and private clouds, large and small, for seven-plus years,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. “The rise of composable services and simpler consumption options are part of that maturation process. Our community is now focused on eliminating future technical debt as well as growing OpenStack’s capabilities to support ever-expanding use cases.”
OpenStack Pike offers new capabilities that would improve manageability and provide greater flexibility and scale, including:
- Nova Cells v2 – The Nova Cells architecture supports large deployments and scaling the compute service. Version 2 allows operators to shard their deployments to help with scaling the database and message queue, as well as segregate failure domains and help eliminate single points of failure.
- Python 3.5 upgrade – Working across all projects, the community introduced support for Python 3.5 to be ready for Python 2.x end-of-life in 2020 and also to take advantage of new features and increased performance in the future.
- Leveraging etcd – At the Forum in Boston, the user and developer communities decided to use etcd v3 as the distributed lock management solution for OpenStack, and integrations are starting to appear in the Pike release.
- Ironic bare metal service matures – Ironic continues to mature in the Pike release with the ability to plug into Neutron networks for true multi-tenancy. Ironic also joins Cinder, Neutron, Nova and Swift as projects that support rolling upgrades, letting operators roll out new code without interrupting service.
- Cinder launches ‘revert to snapshot’ and ability to extend volumes – Revert to snapshot lets users recover from things like data corruption, or to reset after running tests. Users can also now extend storage volumes without shutting down virtual machines (VMs), keeping applications online during extensions.
- Swift object storage lands globally distributed erasure codes – Even if the cross-region network is down, individual regions would still be able to function, and failures in one region can use the remote region to recover. Swift also added performance improvements by enabling users to run multiple concurrent processes per server.
OpenStack’s modular architecture also allows users to pick the functionality they need – whether that’s bare metal or block storage provisioning – to plug into an infrastructure stack. This composability – which makes possible use cases like edge computing and NFV – is a marked distinction from proprietary on-premises offerings, or even earlier versions of OpenStack.
The new capabilities of OpenStack Pike will be demonstrated at the upcoming OpenStack Summit, happening November 6-8 in Sydney, Australia. Attendees from more than 50 countries will gather to hear speakers from American Airlines, China Railway, Saudi Telecom, Commonwealth Bank, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Sprint, Adobe Marketing Cloud and Tencent talk about multi-cloud strategies, cost savings and increasing agility with OpenStack.
