OpenStack Havana Adds Metering and Orchestration Features for Scaling Clouds

The OpenStack community marked the eighth release of its open source software for building public, private, and hybrid clouds.

OpenStack Havana introduces nearly 400 new features to support software development, managing data and running application infrastructure at scale.  There were over 900 contributors to the Havana software release, a more than 70% increase from the Grizzly release six months ago. Two new projects, OpenStack Orchestration and Metering, were incubated during the Grizzly release cycle and are now available in the Havana release.

Some of the New Capabilities in OpenStack Havana:

• Application-Driven Capabilities – OpenStack Orchestration, now available as part of the Havana release, is a template-driven service for describing and automating the deployment of compute, storage and networking resources for an application. The new global clusters feature for Object Storage enables you to cut costs and improve performance by replicating and delivering data around the world, and the new QoS capability across Block Storage drivers allows you to guarantee performance requirements for an application.  Docker support was also added to speed application deployment using containers.
  
• Improved Operational Experience – During this release cycle, significant effort went into increasing the breadth of functionality that is exposed through the Dashboard. A new team of user experience experts also contributed their time to improve the UI, workflows and productivity. OpenStack Metering, another new service in Havana, provides users with a single source of usage data across OpenStack services for activities like enterprise chargebacks and feeding systems monitoring tools.
  
• More Enterprise Features – OpenStack continues to mature and support enterprise-driven features such as end-to-end encryption across all Block Storage drivers, SSL support across all service APIs, new VPN and Firewall-as-a-Service capabilities, and support for rolling upgrades and boot from volume, which provides the foundation for live migration. Additionally, popular storage and networking providers continue to improve and write new plugins for OpenStack, making it easier for enterprises to work with their trusted vendors and take advantage of existing infrastructure.

"If software development, managing data or running application infrastructure is strategic to your business, OpenStack is the platform that will accelerate time to value," said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. "We’ve seen more users contribute directly to the Havana release than ever before. It means users are empowered and driving the direction of OpenStack based on their real-world use cases and implementations."

http://www.openstack.org/havana