OpenStack Liberty Release Enhances Manageability & Scalability

The OpenStack Foundation announced the 12th version of the most widely deployed open source software for building clouds.

The OpenStack Liberty release, which is now available for download, brings a number of key improvements, including finer-grained management controls, performance enhancements for large deployments and more powerful tools for managing new technologies like containers in production environment. Some highlights:

Enhanced Manageability - Finer-grained access controls and simpler management features, such as common library adoption and better configuration management, have been added in direct response to the requests of OpenStack cloud operators. The new version also adds role-based access control (RBAC) for the Heat orchestration and Neutron networking projects. These controls allow operators to fine tune security settings at all levels of network and orchestration functions and APIs.

Simplified Scalability - performance and stability improvements that include the initial version of Nova Cells v2, which provides an updated model to support very large and multi-location compute deployments. Additionally, Liberty users will see improvements in the scalability and performance of the Horizon dashboard, Neutron networking Cinder block storage services and during upgrades to Nova’s compute services.

Extensibility to Support New Technologies - OpenStack is a single, open source platform for management of the three major cloud compute technologies; virtual machines, containers and bare metal instances. The software also is a favorite platform for organizations implementing NFV (network functions virtualization) services in their networking topologies. Liberty advances the software’s capabilities in both areas with new features like an extensible Nova compute scheduler, a network Quality of Service (QoS) framework and enhanced LBaaS (load balancing as a service).

Container support - Liberty also brings the first full release of the Magnum containers management project, which supports container cluster management tools Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm. Magnum makes it easier to adopt container technology by tying into existing OpenStack services such as Nova, Ironic and Neutron. Further improvements are planned with new project, Kuryr, which integrates directly with native container networking components such as libnetwork.

Heat orchestration project - adds dozens of new resources for management, automation and orchestration of the expanded capabilities in Liberty. Improvements in management and scale, including APIs to expose what resources and actions are available, all filtered by RBAC are included in the new release.

https://www.openstack.org/software/liberty/