The twelfth release of OpenStack will tackle the cloud software toolset’s size limitations and will offer new options for software defined networking, says the Openstack Foundation.
The new version, Liberty, will help cloud software builders to create more manageable and scalable enterprise services with ‘the broadest support for popular data centre technologies’ the foundation says.
The OpenStack Foundation says Liberty was designed in response to user requests for more detailed management controls. OpenStack has also been criticised for its inability to step up to large scale installations. As a result, its operating core has been strengthened and its production environment will include more powerful tools for managing new technologies, such as containers.
Improvements include a new common library adoption, better configuration management and a new role-based access control (RBAC) for the Heat orchestration and Neutron networking projects. These control improvements, which were specifically requested by cloud operators, will allow them to fine tune security settings at all levels of network and orchestration functions and APIs.
OpenStack’s scalability challenges are to be tackled with an updated model to support very large and multi-location systems. The foundation also promised that Liberty users will see better scaling and performance in the Horizon dashboard, Neutron networking Cinder block storage services and during upgrades to Nova’s computing services.
Liberty also marks the first full OpenStack use of the Magnum containers management project. Magnum will support popular container cluster management tools Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm. Magnum aims to simplify the adoption of container technology by tying into existing OpenStack services such as Nova, Ironic and Neutron. Further improvements are planned with new project, Kuryr, which integrates directly with native container networking components such as libnetwork.
The Heat orchestration project promises ‘dozens’ of new resources for management, automation and orchestration of the expanded capacity of Liberty.
1,933 individuals across more than 164 organizations contributed to OpenStack Liberty through upstream code, reviews, documentation and internationalization efforts. The top code committers to the Liberty release were HP, Red Hat, Mirantis, IBM, Rackspace, Huawei, Intel, Cisco, VMware, and NEC.