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The new OpenStack version 2014.1 alias "Icehouse"

House of Cool

Article from ADMIN 22/2014

By Martin Loschwitz

The new OpenStack version "Icehouse" comes with new features and new components, on top of numerous improvements to existing components.

OpenStack release planning is a smooth process, and release manager Thierry Carrez has the reins firmly in hand. The development of OpenStack 2014.1, alias "Icehouse," progressed with very few glitches. OpenStack [1] enjoys an extraordinarily good reputation within the FOSS developer, system administrator, and IT architect community because of its reliable release cycles. In the past two years, the OpenStack cloud platform has gained a reputation for being extremely reliable – with both the timeline and the quality of work. The Icehouse release is both a solid maintenance version and a motor for future innovation. What are the changes? Does the OpenStack cloud framework deliver what its developers promised? Read on for a closer look at the new version.

Trip to Oslo

One of the most important innovations in OpenStack is the Oslo Common Libraries Project [2], which has been around for some time but only truly became an integral part of the OpenStack project in recent months. Oslo's goal is to eliminate the often annoying redundancies in OpenStack source code – and prevent them in future.

OpenStack currently consists of several individual projects, such as the Glance virtual image repository, Nova controller, Cinder block storage, and other components that perform specific tasks. Because of mandatory project standards, however, many components need to continually re-implement individual functions themselves: RPC communication with various AMQP services is a good example. In the past, one OpenStack project often has adopted and modified source code from another – which is bad for several reasons: A new release does not automatically ensure that improvements in one part of the source code filter down to the copies; a manual merge takes time and causes trouble.

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