Keyword tags:
Big Data
Cloud Storage
Data Storage Management
The OpenStack community released Newton, the 14th version of the most widely deployed open source software for building clouds. Latest features in the Ironic bare metal provisioning service, Magnum container orchestration cluster manager, and Kuryr container networking project more seamlessly integrate containers, virtual and physical infrastructure under one control plane. These new abilities address more use cases for organisations with diverse environments, who are looking for speed and greater developer experience with new technologies like containers, alongside workloads that need virtual machines or higher availability architectures.
In addition, the Newton release addresses scalability and resiliency. New capabilities will be demonstrated at the upcoming OpenStack Summit, happening October 25-28, in Barcelona Spain.
Improved Scalability
The Newton release significantly lessens architectural and functional barriers to scalability, including the ability to scale up or down across platforms and geographies. This further fortifies OpenStack’s dominance as a solution for clouds of all sizes. Improvements include improved scale-up/scale-down capabilities in Nova, Horizon and Swift; progress with Cells V2 for horizontal scale out of Nova compute environments; the addition of convergence by default in Heat; and multi-tenancy improvements in Ironic.
Enhanced Resiliency
Newton also is remarkable for its developments in high availability, adaptability, and self-healing, thus providing operators further assurance of stability regardless of workload demands. Cinder, Ironic, Neutron and Trove are among the projects that deliver enhanced high availability functionality. Security improvements are incorported in Newton as well. For example, Keystone offers upgrades that involve PCI compliance and encrypted credentials. Cinder complements support for retyping encrypted to unencrypted volumes and vice versa. Additional enhancements in Cinder include micro-version support, the ability to remove volumes with snapshots using the cascading feature, and a backup service that can be scaled to numerous instances.
Better User Experience
The Newton release significantly enhances OpenStack as the one cloud platform for virtualisation, bare metal and containers and enhances the ease of use for operators and app developers, making OpenStack easier to manage, operate, change and fix, with better automation. Magnum offers provisioning for container orchestration tools, namely Swarm, Kubernetes and Mesos. Magnum’s new features involve an operator-centric Install Guide, support for pluggable drivers, support for Kubernetes clusters on bare metal servers, and asynchronous cluster creation. For general bare metal provisioning, Ironic adds multi-tenant networking and firmer integration with Magnum, Kubernetes and Nova.
Besides, Kolla now supports deploying to bare metal. Kuryr brings Neutron networking capabilities to containers, making Swarm combination and Kubernetes combination available for the first time. Another Kuryr highlight is the capability to nest VMs through integration with Magnum and Neutron. To support popular telecom network configurations, VLAN-aware VMs enable organisations to run their existing VNFs in an OpenStack cloud and use per-tenant VLANs to get traffic to them. Nova adds mutable configuration settings, allowing operators to reload particular configuration parameters without restarting the node. Also, Nova’s get-me-a-network feature simplifies network configuration.
According to Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation, “The OpenStack community is focused on making clouds work better for users. This is clearly evident in the Newton release, which tackles users’ biggest needs, giving cloud operators and app developers greater security, resiliency and choice.” He then said, “The new features and enhancements in Newton underscore the power of OpenStack: it handles more workloads in more ways across more industries worldwide. OpenStack is a cloud platform that ties everything together—compute, network, storage, and innovative cloud technologies.”
Newton Release Availability
OpenStack Newton was developed by an international community of 2,581 developers, operators and users from 309 organisations. The OpenStack ecosystem will start rolling out products and services based on OpenStack Newton in the coming weeks and months. Users can find OpenStack Powered distributions and cloud service providers that meet interoperability tests in the OpenStack Marketplace.