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OpenStack: What's new in Grizzly?
Strong as a Bear
Apart from Ubuntu, no other project holds so true to a fixed release cycle as OpenStack. In parallel with Canonical, the developers launch each new version in April and October. This April was no different: Recently, OpenStack 2013.1, known as Grizzly, became available for downloading. As with the previous releases, much has changed this time around. For administrators of existing cloud deployments, the question arises as to whether an upgrade is worthwhile and whether it is easy to handle. So far, OpenStack has not exactly crowned itself with glory when it comes to updates.
Up to now, the only reasonable advice to OpenStack admins was: Do not try to update one OpenStack version to another. The first tagged with the "Enterprise Ready" label, OpenStack Essex, became available in April 2012. At that time, the developers promised to pay more attention to API compatibility between old and new versions in the future – with very modest success: Updating from Essex to its successor Folsom was complicated to impossible.
API Stability
Between Folsom and Grizzly, the developers seem to have done their homework: Instead of changing existing APIs, they added additional APIs and gave these higher version numbers.
This approach becomes clear in the case of Keystone, the authentication component: In addition to the API v2 which already existed in Folsom, Keystone now has an API 3.0 that works in parallel with the old API so that existing installations do not require reconfiguration.
The developers promise that the old API will remain at least until the next release, that is, the I-release (as with Ubuntu, all OpenStack releases are given code names that follow the alphabet, e.g., the successor of Grizzly is Havana).
That said, functions of the 3.0 API cannot be harnessed from within the 2.0 API. In a test of the previous version, migrating a Folsom Keystone to a Grizzly
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