OpenStack Kilo, the 11th release of the open source software for building public, private, and hybrid clouds has nearly 400 new features to support software development, big data analysis and application infrastructure at scale. The OpenStack community continues to attract the best developers and experts in their disciplines with 1,492 individuals employed by more than 169 organizations contributing to the Kilo release.
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The 11th release of OpenStack marks a turning point for the open source project with contributions from nearly 1,500 developers and 169 organizations worldwide. As core of platform matures, focus turns to interoperability in the market, raising the bar for driver compatibility, and extending the platform to fit workloads with bare metal and containers.
Kilo offers new API versioning management with v2.1 and microversions to provide reliable, strongly validated API definitions. This makes it easier to write long-lived applications against compute functionality. Major operational improvements include live upgrades when a database schema change is required, in addition to better support for changing the resources of a running VM.
Erasure coding provides efficient and cost-effective storage, and container-level temporary URLs allow time-limited access to a set of objects in a container. Kilo also offers improvements to global cluster replication, storage policy metrics and full Chinese translation.
Major updates to testing and validation requirements for backend storage systems across 70 options ensures consistency across storage choices as well as continuous testing of functionality for all included drivers. Also, users can now attach a volume to multiple compute instances to enable new high-availability and migration use cases.
The load-balancing-as-a-service API is now in its second version. Additional features support NFV, such as port security for OpenVSwitch, VLAN transparency and MTU API extensions. Additional architectural updates improve scale for future releases.
Kilo sees the first full release of the Ironic bare-metal provisioning project with support for existing VM workloads and adoption of emerging technologies like Linux containers, platform-as-a-service and NFV. Users can place workloads in the best environment for their performance requirements. Ironic is already used in production environments including Rackspace OnMetal.
Identity federation enhancements work across public and private clouds to support hybrid workloads in multi-cloud environments.
The OpenStack Technical Committee and contributors to the 11th release would like to dedicate Kilo in memory of Chris Yeoh, who passed away earlier this month. Chris contributed significantly to the OpenStack Nova project, and his community spirit, technical contributions and friendship will be greatly missed.
Watch a video of Chris's contributions to Nova
Thank you to the global team of 1,593 developers who delivered the eleventh OpenStack release on time with every critical feature: