The OpenStack community released the 13th version of its open source software for building clouds, with a focus on manageability, scalability and end-user experience. OpenStack is an integration engine that can manage bare metal, virtual machines, and container orchestration frameworks with a single set of APIs.
OpenStack is approaching its sixth anniversary.
Here are some highlight’s of the OpenStack Mitaka release:
- Simplified Manageability – includes numerous advancements that focus on improving day-to-day ease of use for cloud deployers and administrators. One highlight is a simplified configuration for the Nova compute service that introduces additional standard defaults and reduces the number of options that must be manually selected. The Keystone identity service, too, has been greatly simplified, with multi-step processes for setting up the identity management features of a cloud network—installing, running, authenticating, distributing tokens, etc.—streamlined into a one-step process. Another example of the enhanced manageability available in Mitaka is found in Neutron, which now features improved Layer 3 networking and Distributed Virtual Router (DVR) support.
- Greater Scalability – Heat’s convergence engine, which first appeared in the Liberty release, can now handle larger loads and more complex actions for horizontal scaling, while delivering better performance for stateless operations. Similarly, in Keystone, fernet tokens increase the number of API operations the identity service can support. Developers also made significant progress on Cells v2, another feature introduced in Liberty that aids in horizontally scaling out OpenStack compute clouds.
- Improved User Experience – a unified OpenStack Client provides a consistent set of calls for creating resources so end users don’t have to learn the intricacies of each service API. Mitaka also delivers improved support for software development kits (SDKs) across a number of different languages. Another improvement that simplifies that experience for application developers is the ongoing work to add the “get me a network” function in Neutron. This feature will remove all the steps necessary to create a network, attach a server to it, assign an IP to that server, and make the network accessible, and consolidates these steps into a single action. Elements of this functionality are introduced in Mitaka.
The next OpenStack Summit will be held in Austin on April 25-29.
