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Next OpenStack Release, Juno, Drops
The 10th version of the open source platform adds enterprise features, including Big Data management and provisioning services.
OpenStack reached its 10th version today, with the release of Juno. The big upgrades are around enterprise features, making it a potentially bigger player in the public and hybrid cloud sectors.
A press release from the organization says that Juno is focused on "enabling new use cases and addressing advanced networking demands of telcos and service providers." OpenStack is an open source cloud management platform currently used mostly for private clouds. Its growth over the past few years has been significant, and most large organizations, including a recently announced partnership with VMware Inc., have begun integrating OpenStack in their own products.
OpenStack has settled into a twice-yearly upgrade pattern. The previous version, Icehouse, was released last April. It includes 10 core projects that cover the gamut from compute and storage to networking and identity management. The first version, Austin, was released almost exactly four years ago on Oct. 21, 2010.
To better compete in the enterprise segment of the cloud market, OpenStack needed solutions for Big Data, and it's added that with new data-processing capabilities that automate provisioning and management of Big Data clusters using Hadoop and Apache Spark. In regard to Hadoop, support for version 2.4.1 was added.
Storage policies have also been given an enterprise upgrade, with more options to store, replicate and access data across varied back-end systems and geographic locations. In terms of public cloud, where OpenStack hasn't gained much traction but hopes to, the new policies enable public cloud providers to offer storage services tiers.
For enticing the telcos and services providers OpenStack is chasing, the Juno release adds capabilities from the network functions virtualization (NFV) team. The organization describes NFV as "a massive shift in how many networking and telco services are developed and deployed." NFV provides the ability to programmatically define and execute services that run on networks, such as load balancing, intrusion detection, WAN acceleration and firewalls.
Other Juno upgrades related to scaling up and out include faster and more efficient metering and monitoring capabilities. A new driver also allows for managing bare metal hardware directly, further increasing speed.
The OpenStack community is known for its collaboration and passion, and that's borne out in the Juno release. OpenStack says that 1,419 unique contributors provided code, bug fixes and reviews during the development cycle. Overall, Juno adds 342 new features and squashes 3,219 bugs.
The top companies contributing code to Juno, according to OpenStack, are:
- Red Hat Inc.
- Hewlett-Packard Co.
- IBM Corp.
- Mirantis Inc.
- Rackspace US Inc.
- SUSE
- OpenStack Foundation
- B1 Systems GmbH
- VMware Inc.
- NEC Corp. of America
The next OpenStack release is expected to drop April 30, 2015. It's called Kilo, and will include a fully integrated bare metal provisioning service, along with a shared file system, DNS service, queue service and key management.
About the Author
Keith Ward is the editor in chief of Virtualization & Cloud Review. Follow him on Twitter @VirtReviewKeith.