OpenStack Essex-1 milestone

Last week saw the delivery of the first milestone of the Essex development cycle for Keystone, Glance, Horizon and Nova. This early milestone collected about two months of post-Diablo work... but it's not as busy in new features as most would think, since a big part of those last two months was spent releasing OpenStack 2011.3 and brainstorming Essex features.

Keystone delivered their first milestone as a core project, with a few new features like support for additional credentials, service registration and using certificate-based SSL client authentication to authenticate services. It should be easier to upgrade from now on, with support for database migrations.

Glance developers were busy preparing significant changes that will land in the next milestone. Several bugfixes and a few features made it to essex-1 though, including the long-awaited SSL client connections. It also moved to UUID image identifiers.

The Nova essex-1 effort was mostly spent on bugfixing, with 129 bugs fixed. New features include a new XenAPI SM volume driver, DHCP support in the Quantum network manager, and optional deferred deletion of instances. Under the hood, the volume code was significantly cleaned up and XML templates were added to simplify serialization in extensions.

Essex-1 was also the first official OpenStack milestone for Horizon, also known as the Dashboard. New features include a instance details page, support for managing Nova volumes and a new extensible modular architecture. The rest of the effort was spent on catching up with the best of core projects in internationalization, developer documentation, and QA (frontend testing and JS unit tests).

Now, keep your seatbelt fastened, as we are one month away from essex-2, where lots of new development work is expected to land !