OpenStack: What's new in Grizzly?

Strong as a Bear

Conclusions

OpenStack is maturing at a staggering pace. This is particularly evident because, although Grizzly still introduces many new and very useful features to OpenStack, they tend to be smaller and meet the needs of increasingly smaller groups. Seek gigantic innovations like Quantum in Folsom in vain; instead there have been many medium-sized innovations and much attention to detail.

One great achievement is undoubtedly that Cinder and Quantum now come with schedulers that allow seamless scale out of services and thus eliminate potential bottlenecks. Active Directory support in Keystone will be a killer feature for many businesses and fuel potential OpenStack ambitions.

Moreover, many small but useful enhancements and bugfixes make this version of OpenStack very attractive. Cells in Nova, multiple-factor authentication in Keystone, and different back ends in Glance are not groundbreaking, but still very useful.

If you are just starting to look into OpenStack, make sure you do so in the Grizzly release. If you don't need any of the new features, you should nevertheless consider an update because the janitorial work has been done very well in OpenStack Grizzly. At the end of the day, my overall verdict is: Thumbs up!

The Author

Martin Gerhard Loschwitz works as a Principal Consultant at hastexo. His work focuses on high-availability solutions, and in his spare time, he maintains the Linux Cluster Stack for Debian GNU/Linux.

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