What’s new in OpenStack Liberty

The OpenStack logo

Liberty is the name chosen by the OpenStack team for the 12th release which is due on 15th October 2015: tomorrow. Let’s take a look at the major changes and new features that will be featured in this release.

The Big player: Magnum

The first and most important news is the presence of the new component called Magnum. This is the real big player of this release, the world of containers meets OpenStack. Magnum will enable to run containers as nova enables to run VMs. Let’s introduce the key concept directly from Magnum’s guide:

  • Bay: A collection of node objects where work is scheduled
  • BayModel: An object stores template information about the bay which is used to create new bays consistently
  • Node: A baremetal or virtual machine where work executes
  • Pod: A collection of containers running on one physical or virtual machine
  • Service: An abstraction which defines a logical set of pods and a policy by which to access them
  • ReplicationController: An abstraction for managing a group of pods to ensure a specified number of resources are running
  • Container: A Docker container

It might seem daunting, but if you read them once again I’m sure you’ll understand.

The catalog: Murano

The second thing that has been boiling down is the Murano component. This component allows OpenStack users to pull and push resource (mostly images, Heat templates etc.) from/to a central repository. Take a look at the OpenStack Community Application catalog to see with your own eyes the power of this.

Minor, still big changes

  • Nova:
    • Now support the concept of cells that should make it easier to partition resources and access them.
  • Neutron:
    • Quotas can now be assigned to VMs rather than projects alone.
    • IPv6 prefix delegation.
  • Swift:
    • Achieved better performance on slower drives.
  • Cinder:
    • Now supports hierarchical projects quotas enforcement.
    • Frequently used images can now be cached.
  • Glance:
    • Users can now sign images with keys to verify the identity of the image.
  • Horizon:
    • By taking advantage of AngularJS interface is now more fluid and responsive. Also the search feature has been improved by another new component called Searchlight.

Conclusions

Much has been done in this release, of course that’s a reductive list, however for the bravest there’s the OpenStack Liberty Release Notes.

Image courtesy of mark | marksei
mark

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