OpenStack Nova: Main themes for Diablo

A few weeks after the OpenStack Design Summit in Santa Clara, we are starting to get a better picture of what should be in the next version of OpenStack Nova, codenamed Diablo, scheduled for release on September 22.

One big priority of this release is to separate code for the network and volume services, and refactor nova-network code to add a clear internal API. This will allow to plug separate network and volume service providers, and pave the way for integration with future OpenStack projects like Quantum/Melange/Donabe and LunR. In preparation for this, we'll push changes to rely more on the queue (and less on the database) to pass information between components. In the same area, we need some more changes to support multiple NICs and should also provide a client OpenStack API for directly interacting with volumes.

A second theme of the Diablo release is the new distributed scheduler, which should be able to schedule across zones and taking capabilities into account. This will need changes in the way we reference instances, as well as some changes for EC2 API compatibility.

On the API side, we should finalize OpenStack API 1.1 support, including work on floating IPs and shared IP groups. For administrators, instance migration and account administration actions should be added. We'll also ensure good AWS API compatibility and validation.

Support for snapshotting, cloning and booting from volumes should land early in this cycle, as well as new ways of communicating configuration data between host and guest. We also need to integrate with AuthN/AuthZ with the new common Keystone authentication system. Lots of other features are planned (and others might be added before the end), you can check out the blueprints plan for more detail.

Last but not least, on the QA side, we should have continuous automated testing across a range of reference architectures and increase our unittest and smoketest coverage among other efforts to build-in quality.

The first milestone for this cycle, diablo-1, should be released on June 2nd.