Coming up in OpenStack Cactus...

In a bit more than a week, we will hit FeatureFreeze for OpenStack "Cactus" cycle, so we start to have a good idea of what new features will make it. The Cactus cycle focus was on stability, so there are fewer new features compared to Bexar, but the developers still achieved a lot in a couple of months...

Swift (OpenStack object storage)

The Swift team really focused and stability and performance improvements this cycle. I will just single out the refactoring of the proxy to make backend requests concurrent, and improvements on sqlite3 indexing as good examples of this effort.

Glance (OpenStack image registry and delivery service)

Bexar saw the first release of Glance, and in Cactus it was vastly improved to match standards we have for the rest of OpenStack: logging, configuration and options parsing, use of paste.deploy and non-static versioning, database migrations... New features include a CLI tool and a new method for client to verify images. Glance developers might also sneak in an authentication middleware and support for HTTPS connections !

Nova (OpenStack compute)

A lot of the feature work in Nova for Cactus revolved around the OpenStack API 1.1 and exposing features through XenServer (migration, resize, rescue mode, IPv6, file and network injection...). We should also have the long-awaited live migration feature (for KVM), support for LXC containers, VHD images, multipleNICs, dynamically-configured instance flavors or volume storage on HP/Lefthand SANs. XenAPI should get support for Vlan network manager and network injection. We hope support for VMWare/vSphere hypervisor will make it.

The rest of the Nova team concentrated on testing, bugfixing (already 115 bugfixes committed to Cactus !) and producing a coherent release, as evidenced by the work on adding the missing Ipv6 support for FlatManager network model. I should also mention that the groundwork for multi-tenant accounting and multiple clusters in a region also landed in Cactus.

Over the three projects branches, last month we had more than 2500 commits by more than 75 developers. Not too bad for a project less than one-year-old... We'll see the result of this work on Cactus release day, scheduled April 14.