Last week, the OpenStack community released Grizzly — the seventh release of its open source software for building public, private, and hybrid clouds.
Grizzly has nearly 230 new features to support production operations at scale and greater integration with enterprise technologies, including broad Software-Defined Networking support. These include:
- OpenStack Compute – Compute delivers improved production operations at greater scale, with “Cells” to manage distributed clusters and the “NoDB” host architecture to reduce reliance on a central database. Improvements in virtualization management deliver new features and greater support for multiple hypervisors, including ESX, KVM, Xen and Hyper-V. Additional functionality was added for bare metal provisioning, shared storage protocols and online networking features such as the ability to hot add/remove network devices.
- OpenStack Object Storage – Cloud operators can now take advantage of quotas to automatically control the growth of their object storage environments. Additionally, the ability to perform bulk operations makes it easier to deploy and manage large clusters and provides an improved experience for end users. Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) enables browser connections directly to the back-end storage environment, improving the performance and scalability of web-integrated object storage clusters.
- OpenStack Block Storage – The second full release of OpenStack Block Storage delivers a full storage service for managing heterogeneous storage environments from a centralized access point. A new intelligent scheduler allows cloud end users to allocate storage based on the workload. There are also new drivers for a diverse selection of backend storage devices, including Ceph/RBD, Coraid, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, IBM, NetApp, Red Hat/Gluster, SolidFire and Zadara.
- OpenStack Networking – The Grizzly network-as-a-service platform adds support for Big Switch, Hyper-V, PlumGrid, Brocade and Midonet to complement the existing support for Open vSwitch, Cisco UCS/Nexus, Linux Bridge, Nicira, Ryu OpenFlow, and NEC OpenFlow. OpenStack Networking achieves greater scale and higher availability by distributing L3/L4 and dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) services across multiple servers. A new load-balancing-as-a-service (LBaaS) framework and API lays the groundwork for further innovation from the broad base of networking companies already integrating with OpenStack.
- OpenStack Dashboard – OpenStack Dashboard brings an improved user experience, greater multilingual support, and exposes new features across OpenStack clouds, like Networking and LBaaS. The Grizzly Dashboard is also backwards compatible with the Folsom release, allowing users to take advantage of additional features in their Folsom cloud prior to a full upgrade to the latest version.
- OpenStack Identity – A new token format based on standard PKI functionality provides major performance improvements and allows offline token authentication by clients without requiring additional Identity service calls. OpenStack Identity also delivers more organized management of multi-tenant environments with support for groups, impersonation, role-based access controls (RBAC), and greater capability to delegate administrative tasks. OpenStack Image Service – There were major advancements in image sharing between cloud end users, and the creation of a set of common properties on images to provide more discoverable images and better performance when retrieving images.
“The Grizzly release is a clear indication of the maturity of the OpenStack software development process, as contributors continue to produce a stable, scalable and feature-rich platform for building public, private and hybrid clouds,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. “The community delivered another packed release on schedule, attracting contributions from some of the brightest technologists across virtualization, storage, networking, security, and systems engineering. They are not only solving the complex problems of cloud, but driving the entire technology industry forward.”
“With OpenStack, we have been able to launch a stable infrastructure service to support our agile development teams,” said Reinhardt Quelle, operations architect, Cisco WebEx. “Instead of waiting weeks for deployments, the devops teams who have adopted the platform are deploying multiple times a day, and the pace of product innovation that enables will be critical to our success. OpenStack’s modularity and extensibility has enabled us to adapt the service to our specific problems.”