As usual it took about 6 months to the open source cloud computing project OpenStack to have released OpenStack Havana 2013.2 and it is release number eighth for the IaaS for public, private, and hybrid clouds, where about 400 new improvements have been added to the product and fixed more than 3000 reported bugs.
The Havana release includes many changes and lots of new features such as OpenStack Metering and OpenStack Orchestration, these new enhancements together with some already existing such as global clusters for Object Storage and Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities for Block Storage create would help companies that are using OpenStack to create or deploy applications on clouds, to have their Iaas transformed into a PaaS or a SaaS cloud.
The long list of the key new features and known bugs and upgrade tips can be found on the OpenStack’s Wiki.
OpenStack community is also getting ready for a 4 day summit in Hong Kong where there will be discussions about the cloud computing project and possible planning of the next development cycles which is already been codenamed “Icehouse”.
What basically OpenStack is trying to do is to allow enterprises to create a private cloud solution, it is reasonable to understand that there are still so many bugs, on the other side it could make you think that the platform has a low maturity level and it could be discouraging for enterprises to adopt it. We would assume that the majority of companies that are using OpenStack are as well those who are contributing to the community, also because more than 200 companies joined the project among which the main part is formed by big names such as Rackspace, IBM, HP, Cisco and so on. Anyhow this can be a decisive release for the project, it is the right time for new platforms to be adopted by enterprises and for OpenStack is a good chance to gain some significative use cases.