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OpenStack Icehouse, the ninth release of the open source software for building public, private, and hybrid clouds, has nearly 350 new features to support software development, managing data and application infrastructure at scale. The OpenStack community continues to attract the best developers and experts in their disciplines with 1,202 individuals employed by more than 120 organizations contributing to the Icehouse release.
Learn how organizations are using OpenStack and options for commercial support at the upcoming Summit.
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OpenStack Icehouse has nearly 350 new features that reflect a community-wide effort to bring the voice of the user into the rapidly maturing open source cloud software platform. Key themes this release cycle have been raising the bar on testing and stability, as well as tighter integration across the platform. OpenStack Database Service (Trove) also became part of the integrated release in Icehouse.
New support for rolling upgrades minimizes the impact to running workloads during the upgrade process. Testing requirements for third-party drivers have become more stringent, and scheduler performance is improved. Other enhancements include improved boot process reliability across platform services, new features exposed to end users via API updates (e.g., target machines by affinity) and more efficient access to the data layer to improve performance, especially at scale.
Object Storage released discoverability, which dramatically improves workflows and saves time by allowing users to ask any Object Storage cloud what capabilities are available via API call. Additional improvements included a new replication process that improves performance with data that is more efficiently transported through s-sync instead of r-sync protocol. Significant progress was also made on ongoing storage policies features and will be further developed for the Juno release.
Block Storage added backend migrations with tiered storage environments, allowing for performance management in heterogeneous environments. Mandatory testing for external drivers now ensures a consistent user experience across storage platforms, and fully distributed services improve scalability. Overall quality, dependability and upgrades were a focus for Icehouse including fixing more than 400 bugs.
Networking introduced tighter integration with Compute in Icehouse that includes improved consistency with bulk instance creation and improved provisioning. There is better functional testing for actions that require coordination between multiple services, and third-party driver testing now ensures consistency and reliability across network implementations. Significant progress was made during the Icehouse release cycle to bring OpenStack Networking (Neutron) to feature parity with Nova-Networking, but both options are still available for users in the Icehouse release.
OpenStack Dashboard again expanded its multi-lingual support and now includes 16 languages with the addition of German, Hindi and Serbian. Additional improvements to the general user interface and experience were also implemented such as a more self-guided navigation, inline table editing and extensibility.
The first iteration of federated authentication is now supported allowing users to access private and public OpenStack clouds with the same credentials. General stability and performance improvements were also made.
Automated scaling of additional resources across the platform, including compute, storage and networking is now available. A new configuration API brings more lifecycle management for applications, and new capabilities are available to end-users that were previously limited to cloud administrators. Collaboration with OASIS resulted in the TOSCA Simple Profile in YAML v1.0, demonstrating how the feedback and expertise of hands-on OpenStack developers can dramatically improve the applicability of standards.
Telemetry features improved access to metering data used for automated actions or billing / chargeback purposes.
A new capability included in the integrated release allows users to manage relational database services in an OpenStack environment.
The Image Service features improved calculation of storage quotas, and the project moved to using 0-based indices for location entries.
Thank you to the global team of 1,202 developers who delivered the ninth OpenStack release on time with every critical feature:
