Author: Brad Topol
Source: Planet OpenStack

Kilo Release of OpenStack: Dedicated to the loving memory of Chris Yeoh

Sadly, during this past release the OpenStack and IBM communities lost Chris Yeoh, an incredible contributor, leader, and dear friend to all of us. Chris was simply an amazingly talented OpenStack contributor and was beloved by many for his kindness, generosity, and his willingness to help others no matter how much he had on his plate. Please consider sharing your fond memories of Chris with his family by clicking here.

Highlights of the Kilo Release

Increased enterprise security, improved interoperability, quality improvements, and user experience enhancements are just a few of the highlights of the latest release of OpenStack codenamed Kilo. As the OpenStack ecosystem celebrates yet another successful milestone, I wanted to honor all of OpenStack’s developers by highlighting some of the best new features users can expect in this latest release as well as describing some truly amazing contributions by team IBM.

Ecosystem Growth

The OpenStack ecosystem continues to experience outstanding growth. In the Kilo release, contributors from 112 organizations made over 19,000 commits, added over 390 features, and fixed over 7,200 bugs. Like many of the loyal contributors to OpenStack, IBM remains committed to the success of OpenStack by increasing contributions focused on improving the OpenStack ecosystem for the benefit of the entire OpenStack community and accelerating its growth. I’m excited to have the opportunity to present an early preview of the key contributions for this latest release.

Increased Enterprise Security

IBM continues to lead several enterprise integration efforts in OpenStack’s Identity Service project codenamed Keystone and we have been the top contributor to Keystone for the past four OpenStack releases. IBMers enabled remote administration of domain configuration attributes without requiring a shutdown/restart of Keystone. In addition, we added OpenID Connect support to the Keystone federation framework, and increased CADF audit support coverage for Keystone operations on users, groups, domains, trusts, regions, endpoints, policies, and roles.

In addition, IBMers collaborated heavily with contributors from CERN, Rackspace, Yahoo, HP, and UFCG-LSD to add new enhancements to improve Keystone’s hybrid cloud support based on industry standard federation protocols. These efforts are key to enabling interoperable hybrid clouds based upon Keystone to Keystone federation based hybrid clouds. For users this means it will be simpler to combine their on premise OpenStack cloud with the public cloud of their choice.

Improved Interoperability

One of the key themes for the OpenStack Kilo release was improved interoperability. IBM is one of the key leaders of the Refstack and Refstack-client projects which are the OpenStack projects focused on improving interoperability. IBM is currently the #1 contributor to refstack-client and the #2 contributor for Refstack. IBMers defined specifications for Refstack and Refstack-client, added configuration documentation, and developed APIs to retrieve and render individual test run data uploaded by vendors to the Refstack server.

Block Storage Improvements

For three consecutive release cycles, IBM has continued to lead in contributions to OpenStack’s Block Storage project codenamed Cinder. In this release, IBMers focused on improving the quality of Cinder. Key quality improvements were made to volume migration, volume replication, lazy translation, and its oslo support. Additionally, IBMers added a new Flashsystem volume driver, and consistency group support for the GPFS, storwize SVC and XIV/DS8k drivers.

Enhanced User Experience: Horizon and OpenStackClient Enhancements

As we continue to improve the OpenStack user experience, IBM increased its contributions in the Kilo cycle to both the OpenStack dashboard project (Horizon) and the OpenStackClient. IBMers contributed over 1600 code reviews and also were Horizon’s third highest committer. New features added to Horizon by IBMers include serial console support, integration of the magic search functionality from Eucalyptus, and a new globalization verification tool. We also contributed Angular enhancements for performing password validation, confirmation dialogs, and launching instances. In addition, IBMers collaborated with contributors from Yahoo to add federation based web single sign-on support to Horizon.

In this release of OpenStack, the OpenStackClient command line project became officially integrated into OpenStack. The OpenStackClient is a key user experience enhancement as it provides a single, unified command line interface for all the OpenStack integrated projects. Without this unified client, consumers of OpenStack would have to learn separate command line interfaces for each OpenStack sub-project. IBMers have been contributing to the OpenStackClient since its early days as a little known incubator project and in the Kilo release we were the top contributor to this project. We are very happy to see that the OpenStackClient has reached a level of maturity that the OpenStack Technical Committee has approved it to become an OpenStack project.

Database as a Service Enhancements

In this release of OpenStack, IBMers began contributing to OpenStack’s database as a service project codenamed Trove. IBMers added both Apache CouchDB and DB2 Express C plugins to Trove. Additionally, we added CADF based audit support to several key Trove supported operations. With this new functionality, we are helping to grow Trove’s applicability and consumability.

Heat Enhancements

In this release of OpenStack, the TOSCA Heat Translator was officially accepted and integrated as part of the OpenStack Heat orchestration program. This project was initially started as an incubator by IBMers and grew to have its own substantial ecosystem. It’s key function is to support the translation of portable applications written in the OASIS TOSCA open standard language to run as HOT templates. The project provides a framework to enable other orchestration template languages to also be translated to HOT templates. Thus, this component serves as a conduit for any orchestration technology to be deployed on Heat as HOT templates.

Furthermore, IBMers added multi-region support to Heat. This allows for deploying parts of an overall stack, defined as nested templates, to different regions in OpenStack. This long requested feature is a critical enabler for important enterprise and Telco use cases.

Join us in Vancouver!

Unfortunately it is simply not possible in this article to cover all the innovations that have been added to OpenStack by IBM in the Kilo release. Furthermore, there are many other outstanding contributions in this release by active contributors from other companies. Please join us at the next OpenStack summit in Vancouver May 18-22 for a much more comprehensive overview of the advances and improvements in the latest version of OpenStack. I look forward to seeing you in Vancouver!

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