OpenStack Grizzly

Today OpenStack’s 7th release, called “Grizzly”, will be released. and I just want to thank the over 500 stackers who contributed and the many more who participated in the OpenStack Summit last October where this release was planned.  This release, more than any before it, was driven by users who have been running OpenStack in production for the past year (or more) and have asked for broader support for the compute, storage, and networking technologies they trust and even greater scale and ease of operations.

On the compute side, we saw innovations for those operating at massive scale like “Cells” to manage distributed clusters and “NoDB” to reduce reliance on central databases, as well as big improvements in virtualization management with full support for ESX, KVM, XEN, and Hyper-V.

In the storage world, quotas were added to the object storage system as well as Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) to enable browsers to talk directly to back-end storage environments.  And in block storage land, 10 new drivers were added including Ceph/RBD, Coraid, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, IBM, NetApp, Red Hat/Gluster, SolidFire and Zadara, while the system itself became much more sophisticated with an intelligent scheduler for allocating the right class of storage for each workload, such as for performance, cost or efficiency.

Networking is an area everyone is talking about (and investing in), and with Grizzly their was a focus on achieving greater scale and higher availability by distributing L3/L4 and dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) services across multiple servers. A new load-balancing-as-a-service (LBaaS) framework and API will bring another wave of investment and innovation in the coming months.  To deliver on the choice users are demanding,  we saw new plugins from Big Switch, Hyper-V, PlumGrid, Brocade and Midonet in addition to the existing support for Open vSwitch, Cisco UCS/Nexus, Linux Bridge, Nicira, Ryu OpenFlow, and NEC OpenFlow.  And many others are releasing plug ins now, including Arista, Extreme Networks, Ruijie, and Mellanox. Exciting time as we explore the final frontier of the software defined datacenter!

Since the Dashboard is all about UX, I recorded a short demo in place of a write up:

Some other helpful links:

  • Thierry posted to the openstack-announce mailing list with additional info and links here.
  • You can read more about the new features on this new Grizzly page.
  • Read the Grizzly Release Notes
  • Blog Post from Aaron Rosen:  Building a multi-tier application with openstack (highlights some exciting new features like LBaaS)
  • The folks at Bitergia once again did some great work analyzing the contributions and blogged about it today.

If you’re already a user, don’t forget to make your voice heard by taking this user survey and by attending our next OpenStack Summit in Portland April 15th-18th.  We fight for the users!

@sparkycollier

 

 

 

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