The new OpenStack version 2014.1 alias "Icehouse"

House of Cool

Conclusions

OpenStack Icehouse (Figure 4) is both a solid maintenance release and a new version with great innovations. You'll find many, very practical innovations in Glance, Nova, Neutron, and Cinder that add new tricks without compromising compatibility with previous versions. After the compatibility disasters of the first OpenStack versions, the attention to compatibility is a good thing.

Figure 4: The Icehouse release offers improvement to many of the core OpenStack components.

Heat and Ceilometer float between the worlds: Although both were already aboard in Havana, it is evident in Icehouse that the predecessors offer only a small taste of the true potential that the solution for metering and automation holds. Heat, in particular, generates much excitement in Icehouse because it comes with a whole cornucopia of new features geared to attract users. If the development of the program continues at the same pace, we are likely to see Heat a few steps ahead of its role model, Amazon CloudFormation, in the foreseeable future.

Then, there are the newbies: Trove offers a genuine DBaaS services, and Ironic enters the scene as the successor to TripleO and orchestrates the deployment of VMs as well as that of the hosts running the VMs. Ironic is still not an official core component in Icehouse, but a quick look at the tool is already worthwhile, and it likely will join the ranks of the core components in the near future. More projects are looming on the horizon: Sahara seeks to offer prebuilt Hadoop on the basis of OpenStack, and Mistral will be a sort of cronjob for OpenStack that handles specific commands on a time basis. Things are happening at OpenStack, and Icehouse offers a good insight into the philosophy and the work ethic that dominate the OpenStack scene. First and foremost, Icehouse is a successful release, which impresses with its feature richness.

Infos

  1. OpenStack: http://www.openstack.org/
  2. Oslo Common Libraries Project: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Oslo
  3. OpenStack Wiki: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/

The Author

Martin Gerhard Loschwitz works as a Principal Consultant at hastexo, where he focuses on high availability, distributed storage, and OpenStack. In his spare time he maintains Pacemaker for Debian.

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