Havana release makes it easier to build and deploy apps with OpenStack clouds

HONG KONG: OpenStack Havana, the eighth release of the open source software for building public, private, and hybrid clouds, is available with 400 new features to support software development, managing data and application infrastructure at scale.

New services like OpenStack Metering and Orchestration, coupled with enhancements to existing services like global clusters for Object Storage and QoS capabilities for Block Storage make it ideal for organizations that are building or deploying applications with OpenStack clouds.

"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."

The OpenStack community continues to innovate at an even greater pace with 910 contributors to the Havana release, a 60 percent increase from the Grizzly release six months ago. More than 145 OpenStack ecosystem members employ developers who contributed to this release, including Canonical, Dreamhost, eNovance, HP, IBM, Intel, Mirantis, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE, and Yahoo!.

According to the latest user survey, OpenStack has been deployed in at least 358 cities across 72 countries.

Nearly 400 new features were added to the open source cloud platform across compute, storage, networking and cross-platform services. Two new projects, OpenStack Orchestration and Metering, were incubated during the Grizzly release cycle and are now available in the Havana release. These new features provide users with:

● 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, 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.