The 11th release of OpenStack, codenamed Kilo is made available for download on Thursday, promising greater stability and scale across the newly defined OpenStack core services. Kilo is touted as the first full release of the bare metal service, Ironic, for provisioning workloads that require direct access to hardware.
The OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) development project consists of a number of sub-projects, including the Nova compute engine, the Swift storage system for files and objects, Cinder for block storage and Neutron for networking, along with the Horizon dashboard to administer the OpenStack IaaS.
Among others, the new Kilo offers new API versioning management with v2.1 and microversions to provide reliable, strongly validated API definitions in its Nova compute, which brings major operational improvements including live upgrades when a database schema change is required. The Neutron Networking - load-balancing-as-a-service API is now upgraded to its second version. It also brings additional features to support NFV, such as port security for OpenVSwitch, VLAN transparency and MTU API extensions.
According to OpenStack, Kilo is purpose-built for the "software-defined economy," where agile cloud resources support app developers and software innovations. OpenStack said that the latest release marks a turning point for the open source project with contributions from nearly 1,500 developers and 169 organizations worldwide. Top contributing companies to the Kilo release include Red Hat, HP, IBM, Mirantis, Rackspace, OpenStack Foundation, Yahoo!, NEC, Huawei and SUSE.
Subbu Allamaraju, Chief Engineer, Cloud, eBay Inc
The ability to scale and operate efficiently is critical when you want to offer large data center footprint via services for mission-critical workloads. OpenStack Kilo delivers a robust set of enhancements and tooling to deploy and operate compute, storage and networking resources at scale. Kilo is the most robust, fully production hardened release of OpenStack, and we’re looking forward to putting it to work.
