The Skinny on OpenStack Kilo – NFV & IPv6, Bare Metal Cloud, and More

The 11th release of OpenStack has officially landed in advance of the OpenStack summit, which makes this the “K” release of OpenStack, and it has aptly been named Kilo, for the hefty goodness it brings with it.

The long, tall and skinny of Kilo

So like all of our post on OpenStack releases, we like to give the basic stats and outline what’s exciting in the latest version.  OpenStack Kilo boasts nearly 1,500 contributors – 1,494 to be exact – where the up from the 1,419 contributors to OpenStack Juno the previous release, and a 20% increase from the OpenStack Icehouse release.  These contributors span 169 leading organizations – the top ones being  Red Hat, HP, IBM, Mirantis, Rackspace, OpenStack Foundation, Yahoo!, NEC, Huawei and SUSE, who contributed 394 new features,7,257 bugs fixes, 792,200 strings translated, and 113 drivers and plugins supported across the compute, storage and networking capabilities in the Kilo integrated release and common libraries.

Open cloud orchestration for OpenStack releases – Kilo to Liberty. Get Started.  Go

The OpenStack Foundation defines the key themes in Kilo as offering:

• A Tightly Defined Core: Greater stability and scale across the newly defined OpenStack core services – compute, networking, storage with a better defined common foundation for OpenStack clouds.
• Interoperability: More rigorous testing standards to ensure consistency across more than 100 drivers and plugin options, along with improved identity federation to enable hybrid and multi-cloud use cases

• Beyond Virtual Machines: First full release of the bare metal service, Ironic, for provisioning workloads that require direct access to hardware – delivering the next generation of bare metal provisioning.  This coupled with a solid platform to support existing workloads, and adopt emerging technologies like containers, PaaS and NFV.

On top of these, Kilo brings with it new object storage support for erasure coding providing new capabilities for balancing density and durability based on applications, along with evolving development processes to speed up integration of technologies like DNS, key management and containers.
Like with Juno, the NFV use case is increasingly gaining importance in OpenStack releases – and this is also the case with Kilo, as the number of production OpenStack deployments for this use case comprise nearly half the number of OpenStack deployments of this cloud to date.  This can be seen through the added features of port security for OpenVSwitch, VLAN transparency and MTU API extensions.

Some key new features by OpenStack component:

• Swift Object Storage now supports an erasure-code (EC) storage policy type (beta), allowing deployers to achieve very high durability with less raw capacity as used in replicated storage.
• OpenStack Compute (Nova) now has the first release of the next generation of the Nova API, v2.1.
• The OpenStack Dashboard Horizon has seen a lot of UI upgrades – from theming to UX improvements for Sahara – as well as improvements across the board for all the components from Nova through Cinder, Glance Heat and more, along with features such as federated authentication via web SSO.
• Keystone OpenStack Identity has seen updates in numerous areas from hierarchal multi-tenancy, to identity federation, LDAP, authorization  and more.

This on top of many improvements around Cinder, Heat, Glance, Ceilometer and more.
You can read the full release notes here, and follow our OpenStack tag this week for an excellent lineup of posts – from Docker to TOSCA, NFV, auto-scaling, Neutron and more.
For those who can’t make it out to Vancouver, we will be broadcasting live from the ground with our OpenStack & Beyond podcast on May 20th at 9AM PST – so tune in.