We are pleased to announce Diablo, the fourth release of OpenStack. In the 6 months since the Cactus release, we have seen the OpenStack community grow to over 1500 people and 110 member companies, and a great increase in the number of production deployments across the globe. OpenStack continues to mature and build upon the momentum of the previous Cactus release.
This release marks the first 6 month release cycle of OpenStack. The next release, Essex, will also be a 6 month release cycle and development is now officially underway. While Diablo includes over 70 new features, the theme is scalability, availability, and stability.
Feature Highlights
We’ll discuss briefly some of the new features among the core OpenStack projects. For a complete list, please see the official release notes.
OpenStack Compute (Nova)
- Distributed scheduling across zones, allowing larger compute clusters
- A multi-host networking mode providing higher availability in DHCP and VLAN networks
- Ability to snapshot, clone and boot from volumes
- Ability to pause and suspend KVM instances
- Automated instance migration during host maintenance
- Support for Virtual Storage Arrays
OpenStack Storage (Swift)
- Multi cluster synchronization, allowing replication to multiple geographical locations on a container by container basis.
- Initial release of Swift Recon, middleware that allows monitoring of storage nodes and processes
- Ability to report statistics at the container level
OpenStack Image Service (Glance)
- New filtering and searching capabilities, simplifying management of large image stores
- Ability to share images between tenants
- Delayed deletion of images for increased performance
New Projects Overview
During the course of the Diablo release, there was quite about of activity around new and existing projects in the OpenStack eco-system that are poised to take on more prominent roles as of the Diablo release. Two such projects, Identity and Dashboard, were promoted to core status during the Diablo cycle, meaning they will be officially supported projects as of Essex. Quantum, OpenStack’s network as a service project, is in incubation status for Essex. To learn more about the project incubation and core status promotion polices, please see The New Project Process.
OpenStack Identity (Core)
OpenStack Identity (code-named Keystone) provides identity management services across all OpenStack projects via a simple token based authentication system. This will enable those running OpenStack in their environments to authenticate against their existing identity management systems. Keystone will provide an abstract interface to a number of identity systems and support is planned for LDAP, ActiveDirectory, SAML, and OAuth.
OpenStack Dashboard (Core)
The Dashboard project provides a modular web based user interface to OpenStack. This project highlights the functionality within OpenStack while providing a pluggable architecture that makes it easy for companies building products and services that extend OpenStack’s core functionality to integrate with the platform. Today it provides both end users and administrators way to visualize and manage virtual infrastructure, quotas, object storage, network and security resources, and more.
OpenStack Quantum (Incubation)
Quantum is OpenStack’s network as a service solution, enabling advanced network topologies beyond what is possible today in Nova’s existing networking models. Quantum will provide support for layer 2 over layer 3 tunneling to avoid the limitations of VLANs, as well as rate limiting and quality of service guarantees. It will also provide support for monitoring protocols like NetFlow.
Upcoming for the Essex Release
Congratulations to everyone that helped Diablo come together! Up next is the OpenStack Design Summit in Boston. We will be planning the features and progress made during the last 6 months, and looking forward to the next 6 months of the Essex release. Join us October 3rd through 7th at the Boston Intercontinental Hotel!
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