Today OpenStack’s 7th release, called “Grizzly”, will be released.\u00a0and 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. \u00a0This 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.<\/p>\n
On the compute side<\/strong>, 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\u00a0improvements\u00a0in virtualization management with full support for ESX, KVM, XEN, and Hyper-V.<\/p>\n In the storage world<\/strong>, 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. \u00a0And in block storage land, 10 new drivers were added including\u00a0Ceph\/RBD, Coraid, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, IBM, NetApp, Red Hat\/Gluster, SolidFire and Zadara, while the system itself became much more\u00a0sophisticated\u00a0with an intelligent scheduler for allocating the right class of storage for each workload, such as for performance, cost or efficiency.<\/p>\n Networking is an area everyone is talking about<\/strong> (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. \u00a0To deliver on the choice users are demanding, \u00a0we 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. \u00a0And 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!<\/p>\n Since the Dashboard<\/strong> is all about UX, I recorded a short demo in place of a write up:<\/p>\n