OpenStack Ocata has now been out for a little over a month and we’re about to see the first milestone of the Pike release. Past cycles show that now’s about the time when people start looking at the new release to see if they should consider moving to it. So here’s a quick overview of what’s new in this release.
First, it’s important to remember that the Ocata cycle was very short. We usually do a release every six months, but with the rescheduling of the OpenStack Summit and OpenStack PTG (Project Team Gathering) events, Ocata was squeezed into 4 months to realign the releases with these events. So, while some projects squeezed a surprising amount of work into that time, most projects spent the time on smaller features and finishing up tasks leftover from the previous release.
At a high level, the Ocata release was all about upgrades and containers, themes that I heard from almost every team I interviewed. Developers spoke of how we can make upgrades smoother, and how we can deploy bits of the infrastructure in containers. These two things are closely related, and there seems to be more cross-project collaboration this time around than I’ve noticed in the past.
And the themes of upgrades and containers will continue to be prominent in the Pike cycle. Some of the other highlights in the Ocata cycle include:
- Auto-healing: Work was done in Heat to make it easier to recover from a service failure. When an outage is detected, you can have Heat automatically spin up a replacement service, and swap it out without any intervention on the part of the operator.
- Composability: Composable roles are a feature whereby you can specify details of how things are deployed, rather than allowing OpenStack to choose. You can, for example, specify that a particular hardware configuration be used for particular services. This is termed Composable Roles. Work was done in Ocata to expand this to composable upgrades, so that these roles are respected across upgrades as well.
- Multi-factor authentication in Keystone: Work was done in Keystone to improve support of MFA, including OTP (One Time Password) support, and per-user token expiration rules.
- NFV: Network Function Virtualization continues to be an area where we’re seeing a lot of activity, and so a lot of the work in Nova, Neutron, and various other projects focus on these developments. NFV has become more stable in this release and is more fully integrated into TripleO for ease of deployment. This effort is happening under the Apex project.
- Upgrades: Upgrades were a common theme across all projects, with the emphasis being the ability to upgrade from one release to the next with as close to zero downtime as possible. Much of this work centers around TripleO, Heat, and Mistral, for orchestration and automation of the process.