The OpenStack community has released Newton, the 14th version of the most widely deployed open source software for building clouds. New features in the Ironic bare metal provisioning service, Magnum container orchestration cluster manager, and Kuryr container networking project more seamlessly integrate containers, virtual and physical infrastructure under one control plane. These new capabilities address more use cases for organisations with heterogeneous environments, who are looking for speed and better developer experience with new technologies like containers, alongside workloads that require virtual machines or higher availability architectures.
In addition to improving the user experience for container cluster management and networking, the Newton release addresses scalability and resiliency. New capabilities will be demonstrated at the upcoming OpenStack Summit, happening October 25-28, in Barcelona Spain.
Improved Scalability
The Newton release significantly reduces architectural and functional barriers to scalability, including the ability to scale up or down across platforms and geographies. This further cements OpenStack’s dominance as a solution for clouds of all sizes. Enhancements include improved scale-up/scale-down capabilities in Nova, Horizon and Swift; progress with Cells V2 for horizontal scale out of Nova compute environments; the addition of convergence by default in Heat; and multi-tenancy improvements in Ironic.
Enhanced Resilience
Newton also is notable for its advancements in high availability, adaptability, and self-healing, thus giving operators further assurance of stability regardless of workload demands. Cinder, Ironic, Neutron and Trove are among the projects that deliver improved high availability functionality. Security improvements are included in Newton as well; for example, Keystone offers upgrades that include PCI compliance and encrypted credentials. Cinder adds support for retyping encrypted to unencrypted volumes and vice versa. Additional enhancements in Cinder include micro-version support, the ability to delete volumes with snapshots using the cascading feature, and a backup service that can be scaled to multiple instances.
Better User Experience
The Newton release significantly advances OpenStack as the one cloud platform for virtualization, bare metal and containers and enhances the ease of use for operators and app developers, making OpenStack easier to set up, operate, change and fix, with greater automation. Magnum offers provisioning for container orchestration tools, namely Swarm, Kubernetes and Mesos. Magnum’s new features include an operator-centric Install Guide, support for pluggable drivers, support for Kubernetes clusters on bare metal servers, and asynchronous cluster creation. For general bare metal provisioning, Ironic adds multi-tenant networking and tighter integration with Magnum, Kubernetes and Nova; also, Kolla now supports deploying to bare metal. Kuryr brings Neutron networking capabilities to containers, making Swarm integration and Kubernetes integration available for the first time. Another Kuryr highlight is the capability to nest VMs through integration with Magnum and Neutron (early release). To support popular telecom network configurations, VLAN-aware VMs allow companies to run their existing VNFs in an OpenStack cloud and use per-tenant VLANs to get traffic to them. Nova adds mutable configuration settings, allowing operators to reload certain configuration parameters without restarting the node. Also, Nova’s get-me-a-network feature simplifies network configuration.
“The OpenStack community is focused on making clouds work better for users. This is clearly evident in the Newton release, which tackles users’ biggest needs, giving cloud operators and app developers greater security, resilience and choice,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. “The new features and enhancements in Newton underscore the power of OpenStack: it handles more workloads in more ways across more industries worldwide. OpenStack is a cloud platform that ties everything together—compute, network, storage, and innovative cloud technologies.”
