What’s new in OpenStack Ocata

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Coming two months earlier than scheduled, on 22th February 2017, OpenStack Ocata is the 15th release of the OpenStack project. This release was squeezed in a shorter time-frame, nevertheless has a focus on a few important things like: scalability, upgrade process, user experience and manageability.

OpenStack Ocata changes and new features

Ocata is a peculiar release which doesn’t ship with many new features; as a matter of fact OpenStack Ocata tries to stabilize the current features rather than introducing new ones. Ocata also has a focus on security and upgrades: TLS for internal communication is moving forward (to allow safer geographical distribution), and per-service upgrades (TripleO) are getting more and more stable.

Nova (Compute)

  • VM Placement: the Nova filter scheduler will now use the Placement API.
  • Cells v2: are now used by default, offering better high availability.
  • Hyper-V: support has been enhanced to support PCI passthrough and offer better compatibility with UEFI-enabled virtual machines.

Neutron (Networking)

  • Tagging: resources can now be tagged so that multiple resources can be divided in a logic way.

Swift (Object storage)

  • Improved compatibility: byte-order is now stored in Swift Rings so that different architectures behave the same (different Endianess).

Keystone (Identity)

  • Multi-Factor Authentication: can now be specified when authenticating users, and different policies can be applied to different users. Also OTP password support has been enhanced.
  • Auto provisioning for federated identity: user logging in a federated system can now automatically get a project and a role.

Glance (Image service)

  • User “community” images: can now be created by users for everyone to see. Much like shared images, but “community” images can be created by everyone.

Cinder (Block storage)

  • Attach/Detach API: have been refactored.
  • Active/Active HA: Cinder now supports Active/Active clustering avoiding concurrency.

Magnum (Containers)

  • DC/OS Support: Magnum now supports DC/OS as a Container Orchestration Engine.

TripleO (Deployment)

  • Per-service upgrades: can now be performed in parallel/rolling.

Zaqar (Messaging service)

  • Swift backend: has been added, this also leverage Swift replication capabilities.

Conclusion

OpenStack Ocata wasn’t an exciting release, but it still packs quite a few interesting things like Hyper-V PCI passthrough or DC/OS support. We can expect the next release (Pike) to be much more feature-rich and interesting. Thanks to Mirantis and Opensource.com for part of the informations contained in this article.

Image courtesy of mark | marksei
mark

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