OpenStack Foundation has released the 11th version of its IaaS platform for public, private and hybrid clouds. This version has 400 new features and includes input from 1,492 contributors representing 169 companies.
The Kilo release, where K is the eleventh letter of the alphabet, includes the first full release of Ironic, a service that can be used to provision directly on bare metal, in addition to VMs.
According to OpenStack, Ironic is already at production stage in some companies, including in Rackspace’s OnMetal managed cloud offering, but with the new release it’s finally ready for broader adoption.
OpenStack Kilo is publicized as the first full release of the bare metal service, Ironic, to provide workloads that require direct access to hardware. Top contributing companies to the Kilo release include Red Hat, HP, IBM, Mirantis, Rackspace, OpenStack Foundation, Yahoo!, NEC, Huawei and SUSE.
New features are described in detail in the release notes, main new features are:
Compute (Nova)
- Kilo offers new API versioning management with v2.1 and microversions to provide reliable, strongly validated API definitions. Major operational improvements include live upgrades when a database schema change is required, in addition to better support for changing the resources of a running VM.
Object Storage (Swift)
- Erasure coding provides efficient and cost-effective storage, and container-level temporary URLs allow time-limited access to a set of objects in a container. Kilo also offers improvements to global cluster replication, storage policy metrics and full Chinese translation.
Block Storage (Cinder)
- Major updates to testing and validation requirements for backend storage systems across 70 options ensures consistency across storage choices as well as continuous testing of functionality for all included drivers. Also, users can now attach a volume to multiple compute instances to enable new high-availability and migration use cases.
Networking (Neutron)
- The load-balancing-as-a-service API is now in its second version. Additional features support NFV, such as port security for OpenVSwitch, VLAN transparency and MTU API extensions. Additional architectural updates improve scale for future releases.
Bare-Metal Provisioning (Ironic)
- Kilo sees the first full release of the Ironic bare-metal provisioning project with support for existing VM workloads and adoption of emerging technologies like Linux containers, platform-as-a-service and NFV. Users can place workloads in the best environment for their performance requirements. Ironic is already used in production environments including Rackspace OnMetal.
Identity Service (Keystone)
- Identity federation enhancements work across public and private clouds to support hybrid workloads in multi-cloud environments