OpenStack ICEHOUSE is here to chill you this summer

April 17th marked the availability of the 9th release of OpenStack. Code named “ICEHOUSE” it comes at a right time in Summer to chill you with a staggering 350 new features. Keep aside the gimmick and that’s what I call a “Community Effort”.

Let’s have a look at some of the new features and enhancements in OpenStack Icehouse. I will be covering only some of the new features for each component that I feel matters to an everyday OpenStack administrator.

Trove

One of the new additions to OpenStack that I was really looking forward to was the launch of the Database Service. Code named “Trove”, it provides database as a service through the OpenStack environment. The goal is to quickly provision database instances without having to manage the administrative tasks like deployment, patching, backups, configuration etc.

– Currently it has full feature support for MySQL and Precona and experimental for some other ones. But it won’t be long before others are fully supported.

– You have the ability to resize the flavor instance and the cinder volume.

– There is support for backup and restore as well.

Nova

– Now includes support for rolling upgrades, which means live upgrades are now supported.

– A new caching scheduler driver will cache the list of hosts available, thus improving scheduler performance.

– Server groups support in scheduler

– Increased support for compute drivers across Hyper-V, VMware, XenServer & KVM

Swift

– Discoverable capabilities that tells clients (through API) what features are supported in a Swift cluster.

– Automatic retry on read failures will ensure drive failures are transparent to end-user.

Cinder

Some notable feature upgrades include ability to change volume type, implement multiple API workers, import/export backups, addition of new drivers & plugins.

Neutron

Improved performance & stability by adding new drivers & plugins, new Load Balancing-as-a-Service drivers and a new VPN driver from Cisco.

Identity

There are a host of new features added but one of the important one to point out here would be the ability to use federated authentication for multiple Identity Providers.

Horizon

A great news here specially for people like me who are in India is the Horizon is now available in Hindi along with German and Serbian. Some other notable upgrades include live migration support, extend volume support, improvements to the panel navigation which are now expandable and collapsible, a wizard control and many more.

Ceilometer

This recent feature sees new API additions, time-constrained alarms, new storage drivers and added new sources of metrics like that from VMware vCenter Server, OpenDaylight etc.

Heat

Features like HOT Template format for authoring templates and a host of new resources for example AutoScalingGroup & ScalingPolicy that can scale a collection of resources, make orchestration tasks a whole lot easier and simpler.

Like I mentioned earlier there are 350 new features added in this release and it’s definitely not possible to cover all in this blog. Do read the release notes here for a chilling list of the complete set of features.

If you are interested in learning more about OpenStack and getting some hands-on, we offer Red Hat OpenStack Administration (CL210) course. If you are interested, click here for more details and to fill out the form. And we will get back to you.

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