Havana Release Makes It Easier to Build and Deploy Applications with OpenStack Clouds

New Orchestration, Metering, Global Object Storage Cluster and QoS Capabilities Speed Application Deployment

October 17th, 2013 – OpenStack® Havana™, the eighth release of the open source software for building public, private, and hybrid clouds, is available today with nearly 400 new features to support software development, managing data and running application infrastructure at scale. New services like OpenStack Metering and Orchestration, coupled with enhancements to existing services like global clusters for Object Storage and QoS capabilities for Block Storage make it ideal for organizations that are building or deploying applications with OpenStack clouds.

“If software development, managing data or running application infrastructure is strategic to your business, OpenStack is the platform that will accelerate time to value,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. ”We’ve seen more users contribute directly to the Havana release than ever before. It means users are empowered and driving the direction of OpenStack based on their real-world use cases and implementations.“

The OpenStack community continues to innovate at an even greater pace with 910 contributors to the Havana release, a more than 70% increase from the Grizzly release six months ago.  More than 145 OpenStack ecosystem members employ developers who contributed to this release, including Canonical, Dreamhost, eNovance, HP, IBM, Intel, Mirantis, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE, and Yahoo!. According to the latest user survey, OpenStack has been deployed in at least 358 cities across 72 countries.

"Over the past decade Shutterstock has been creating a marketplace to service the needs of creatives around the world, offering 30 million photos and illustrations for license," said Chris Fischer, VP of technology operations at Shutterstock, an OpenStack user and one of the 145 organizations that contributed to the Havana release. "In order to support our speed of development—hundreds of code pushes a month—we've built our own private cloud with unique capabilities. OpenStack provides us with the flexibility you want from the cloud and the control you gain from managing your own infrastructure and has become the platform of choice for all our compute resources."

New Capabilities in OpenStack Havana

Nearly 400 new features were added to the open source cloud platform across compute, storage, networking and cross-platform services. Two new projects, OpenStack Orchestration and Metering, were incubated during the Grizzly release cycle and are now available in the Havana release. These new features provide users with:

• Application-Driven Capabilities – OpenStack Orchestration, now available as part of the Havana release, is a template-driven service for describing and automating the deployment of compute, storage and networking resources for an application. The new global clusters feature for Object Storage enables you to cut costs and improve performance by replicating and delivering data around the world, and the new QoS capability across Block Storage drivers allows you to guarantee performance requirements for an application.  Docker support was also added to speed application deployment using containers.
• Improved Operational Experience – During this release cycle, significant effort went into increasing the breadth of functionality that is exposed through the Dashboard. A new team of user experience experts also contributed their time to improve the UI, workflows and productivity. OpenStack Metering, another new service in Havana, provides users with a single source of usage data across OpenStack services for activities like enterprise chargebacks and feeding systems monitoring tools.
• More Enterprise Features – OpenStack continues to mature and support enterprise-driven features such as end-to-end encryption across all Block Storage drivers, SSL support across all service APIs, new VPN and Firewall-as-a-Service capabilities, and support for rolling upgrades and boot from volume, which provides the foundation for live migration. Additionally, popular storage and networking providers continue to improve and write new plugins for OpenStack, making it easier for enterprises to work with their trusted vendors and take advantage of existing infrastructure.

To see the dashboard demo, detailed release notes and download the source code, go to http://www.openstack.org/havana.

OpenStack Summit Hong Kong

The next OpenStack Summit taking place November 5-8, in Hong Kong, will bring together open source developers, business leaders and OpenStack users around the world to discuss the future of cloud computing. The OpenStack Summit is the premier open cloud event of the year to share cloud deployment case studies and best practices, cover topics of strategic interest for IT executives, and determine the roadmap for “Icehouse”—the next OpenStack release. Headline sponsors include HP, IBM, Red Hat and Ubuntu supported by Canonical, and the event will feature presentations from OpenStack users including Baidu, CERN, Concur, Ctrip, HP, Intel, MIT, PayPal, Quihoo360, iQiyi, Rackspace, Shutterstock and Workday.

About OpenStack®

OpenStack is software for building clouds.

OpenStack clouds enable businesses to rapidly roll out new products, add new features, and improve internal systems while preventing technology lock-in as the only open source cloud platform that’s supported by virtually every IT industry leader. Cisco WebEx, eBay, Intel, PayPal, Sony, MercadoLibre, CERN, Comcast, Best Buy, and hundreds more rely on OpenStack to run their businesses every day, reducing costs and accelerating time to market.

OpenStack is backed by an independent Foundation and global community with more than 12,000 individual members and 260 supporting organizations across 130 countries.

For more information and to join the community, visit www.OpenStack.org.