Now you can watch the keynotes that took place during the OpenInfra Summit in Berlin!
Rolling upgrades, federated identity and tighter platform integration reflect software maturity; continuous integration process drives software reliability.
April 17, 2014 // AUSTIN, Tex. – The ninth release of OpenStack®, code-named Icehouse™, is available today, with new features reflecting a community-wide effort to bring the voice of the user into the rapidly maturing open source cloud software platform.
The software, used by hundreds of companies for building public, private, and hybrid clouds, adds features such as rolling upgrades in OpenStack Compute (Nova). Rolling upgrades simplify the process of upgrading to new versions of the OpenStack software by not requiring virtual machine (VM) instances to be shut down in order for upgrades to install.
“Everyone we talk to wants cloud resources that let them move faster,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. “The evolving maturation and refinement that we see in Icehouse make it possible for OpenStack users to support application developers with the services they need to develop, deploy and iterate on apps at the speeds they need to remain competitive.”
Each OpenStack release has attracted larger and larger groups of contributors. The Icehouse release had 1,202 contributors, a 32 percent increase from the Havana release six months ago. Approximately 350 new features and 2,902 bug fixes were added in the Icehouse release cycle, with a focus on testing, maturity and stability. A new focus on third-party continuous integration (CI) systems has resulted in 53 external systems testing OpenStack compatibility across broad sets of hardware and software configurations. OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon) now supports 16 languages, and the internationalization team translated nearly 700,000 words during the Icehouse cycle.
Top companies contributing code to the Icehouse release were Red Hat, IBM, HP, Rackspace, Mirantis, SUSE, OpenStack Foundation, eNovance, VMware and Intel. Top users contributing code also included Samsung, Yahoo! and Comcast.
Among the approximately 350 new features added are a new program, OpenStack Database Service (Trove), which was incubated during the Havana release cycle and is now available in the Icehouse release. Programs in incubation include OpenStack Bare Metal (Ironic), OpenStack Messaging (Marconi) and OpenStack Data Processing (Sahara).
Features new to Icehouse include:
To see the dashboard demo, detailed release notes and download the source code, go to http://www.openstack.org/icehouse.
The OpenStack Foundation will host a webinar today at 11am PDT via BrightTALK to discuss the Icehouse release in greater depth with two OpenStack users. To register, please visit https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/499/107965.
“OpenStack has crossed the threshold and will become another de facto IaaS standard before the end of the year, when OpenStack compatibility will be a must, not a nice-to-have.”
— Source: Forrester Research, Inc., State Of Cloud Platform Standards: Q1 2014, March 2014
“We host several applications in our OpenStack environment. So, clearly, we’re heavily vested in OpenStack. Icehouse gives us several new capabilities that will make a big difference, including scheduler improvements and instance creation and deletion. Each OpenStack release makes impressive gains in maturity. It’s a march of progress that gives us confidence in the platform and the community.”
— Mike Wilson, senior systems architect at Bluehost
“Cloud computing has become strategic to our business by enabling our developers to move faster and providing a scalable infrastructure to deliver our content services. By using OpenStack, we are not only choosing a cloud platform, but a community in which we have the ability to influence the software roadmap, share knowledge among operators and build even stronger relationships with our technology vendors who are supporting the platform.”
— Andrew Mitry, senior manager of platform infrastructure at Comcast
The next OpenStack Summit will be held May 12-16 in Atlanta to share user deployment case studies, devops best practices, showcase what’s new in the OpenStack vendor ecosystem, and develop the roadmap for the 10th release, Juno. Headline sponsors include Rackspace, Dell, Canonical and SolidFire, along with 90+ other sponsors and exhibitors. The event will feature presentations from a wide range of OpenStack developers and users, representing service providers, application hosters and enterprises.
OpenStack is open source software for building clouds. OpenStack clouds enable businesses to rapidly roll out new products, add new features, and improve internal systems while preventing technology lock-in as the only open source cloud platform that’s supported by every IT industry leader. Hundreds of the world’s largest brands rely on OpenStack to run their businesses every day, reducing costs and accelerating time to market.
OpenStack is backed by an independent Foundation and global community with more than 15,900 individual members and 347 supporting organizations across 137 countries. For more information and to join the community, visit http://www.OpenStack.org.
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