Ending the year well: OpenStack Essex-2 milestone

2011 is almost finished, and what a year it has been. We started it with two core projects and one release behind us. During 2011, we got three releases out of the door, grew from 60 code contributors to about 200, added three new core projects, and met for two design summits.

The Essex-2 milestone was released last week. Here is our now-regular overview of the work that made it to OpenStack core projects since the previous milestone.

Nova was the busiest project. Apart from my work on a new secure root wrapper, we added a pair of OpenStack API extensions to support the creation of snapshots and backups of volumes, the metadata service can now run separately from the API node, network limits can now be set using a per-network base and a per-flavor multiplier, and a small usability feature lets you retrieve the last error that occurred using nova-manage. But Essex is not about new features, it's more about consistency and stability. On the consistency front, the HA network mode was extended to support XenServer, KVM compute nodes now report capabilities to zones like Xen ones, and the Quantum network manager now supports NAT. Under the hood, VM state transitions have been strengthened, the network data model has been overhauled, internal interfaces now support UUID instance references, and unused callbacks have been removed from the virt driver.

The other projects were all busy starting larger transitions (Keystone's RBAC, Horizon new user experience, and Glance 2.0 API), leaving less room for essex-2 features. Glance still saw the addition of  a custom directory for data buffering. Keystone introduced global endpoints templates and swauth-like ACL enforcement. Horizon added UI support for downloading RC files, while migrating under the hood from jquery-ui to bootstrap, and adding a versioning scheme for environment/dependencies.

The next milestone is in a bit more than a month: January 26th, 2012. Happy new year and holidays to all !