(This article is an updated version of a post originally posted here).
OpenStack is busy with so much development activity it’s hard to keep up. 42 (!) specs were targeted for the 3-month long Bexar development cycle… and there are more than 150 active branches. Over December alone, we saw more than 900 commits by 60 different people ! Taking a step back, what new features should you expect to land on February 3rd, in the Bexar release ?
Swift (OpenStack object storage)
The big news in Swift is support for unlimited object size, through the implementation of client-side chunking. The only size limit for your objects is now the available size in your Swift cluster ! You can read more about that exciting feature in John Dickinson’s blog post. We also hope to ship Swauth, DevAuth highly scalable replacement, directly into Swift codebase. Exposure of most of the S3 API in Swift may or may not make it.
Glance (OpenStack image registry and delivery service)
The Glance image service will expose a unified REST API (no more distinction between the image registry and the image delivery services). We will also have the possibility to upload image data and metadata over one single call. Unified client classes will be shipped directly in Glance. We also hope to have a S3 backend…
Nova (OpenStack compute)
There is so much coming up in Nova it’s hard to summarize. Nova will make use of those new Glance client classes, obviously. We will support booting VMs from raw disk images (rather than a kernel/ramdisk/image combination) and have a rescue mode to mount your faulty disks under a sane environment. We plan to have instance snapshots ready. API servers can now expose optional admin features (through the –allow_admin_api flag), like a specific XenServer instance pause or suspend feature.
Lots of improvements might go unnoticed, like the internationalization of messages, the standardization on services using eventlet, more robust logging, or the move of the IP allocation down the stack. We’ll also finalize some incomplete features, like access to your project VLAN through a VPN, security groups that work in all network modes, and we hope to finally ship Hyper-V support.
We hope to have much more: a web-based serial console to access your VMs, ipv6 support, the possibility to deploy hardware in a staging area of your cloud, support for highly available block volumes through Sheepdog, instance diagnostics allowing to retrieve a history of actions on instances, the possibility to do live migration in nova-manage, iSCSI support for XenAPI… But let’s be realistic, not everything will land in time. What doesn’t make it will certainly be in the next release, Cactus, which will be released in April !
Congrats to our awesome development team for making all this possible. Those last two months have been a very fun ride for me 🙂
