The OpenStack community has released Pike, the 16th version of the most widely deployed open source infrastructure software, with a focus on manageability, composability and scale. The software now powers 60 public cloud availability zones and more than a thousand private clouds running across more than five million physical cores.
With new delivery models like private-cloud-as-a-service, it's easier than ever to adopt OpenStack through the open source ecosystem where users are not locked into a proprietary technology or single vendor. OpenStack?s modular architecture also allows you to pick the functionality you need - whether that?s bare metal or block storage provisioning‹to plug into your infrastructure stack. This composability - which makes possible use cases like edge computing and NFV - is a marked distinction from proprietary on-premises offerings, or even earlier versions of OpenStack.
Community trends and statistics:
Composable services are gaining ground to address new use cases like containers, machine learning and edge computing. For example, OpenStack Ironic bare metal service now features enhanced integration for Cinder block storage and Neutron networking, and Cinder can now act as a standalone storage service for virtual machines, bare metal, or containers using Docker or Kubernetes.
Significant development efforts have gone into lifecycle management tools including OpenStack Kolla, which makes it easier to manage and upgrade OpenStack using services like Kubernetes and Ansible. Kolla saw an 19 percent increase in contributors in the Pike release as compared to the Ocata release.
More OpenStack users are adopting a multi-cloud strategy and placing workloads across public and private cloud environments based on cost, compliance and capabilities. According to the April 2017 user survey, vendor lock-in was the number one business driver for OpenStack clouds, and 38 percent of OpenStack deployments interact with at least one other public or private cloud environment.
OpenStack is continuing to experience strong growth with the April 2017 user survey reporting 44 percent more deployments compared to the previous year and new at-scale production deployments in Europe and China at China UnionPay, Paddy Power Betfair and Tencent, which uses OpenStack to power WeChat.
OVH is only the latest player to expand its OpenStack public cloud footprint into Poland. Recently, Swedish provider City Network added a region in Dubai; Telefonica added regions in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Peru; and Fujitsu announced it has 16 OpenStack public cloud availability zones around the world.
"The features and upgrades that Pike brings are the lessons of experience you get from enabling thousands of public and private clouds, large and small, for seven-plus years," said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. "The rise of composable services and simpler consumption options are part of that maturation process. Our community is now focused on eliminating future technical debt as well as growing OpenStack?s capabilities to support ever-expanding use cases."
Pike offers new capabilities that improve manageability and provide greater flexibility and scale, including:
Nova Cells v2: The Nova Cells architecture supports large deployments and scaling the compute service. Version 2 allows operators to shard their deployments to help with scaling the database and message queue, as well as segregate failure domains and help eliminate single points of failure.
Python 3.5 upgrade: Working across all projects, the community introduced support for Python 3.5 to be ready for Python 2.x end-of-life in 2020 and also to take advantage of new features and increased performance in the future.
Leveraging etcd: At the Forum in Boston, the user and developer communities decided to use etcd v3 as the distributed lock management solution for OpenStack, and integrations are starting to appear in the Pike release.
Ironic bare metal service matures: Ironic continues to mature in the Pike release with the ability to plug into Neutron networks for true multi-tenancy. Ironic also joins Cinder, Neutron, Nova and Swift as projects that support rolling upgrades, letting operators roll out new code without interrupting service.
Cinder launches ?revert to snapshot? and ability to extend volumes: Revert to snapshot lets users recover from things like data corruption, or to reset after running tests. Users can also now extend storage volumes without shutting down virtual machines, keeping applications online during extensions.
Swift object storage lands globally distributed erasure codes: Even if the cross-region network is down, individual regions can still function, and failures in one region can use the remote region to recover. Swift also added performance improvements by enabling users to run multiple concurrent processes per server.
