What to expect from Grizzly-1 milestone

The first milestone of the OpenStack Grizzly development cycle is just out. What should you expect from it ? What significant new features were added ?

The first milestones in our 6-month development cycles are traditionally not very featureful. That's because we are just out of the previous release, and still working heavily on bugs (this milestone packs 399 bugfixes !). It's been only one month since we had our Design Summit, so by the time we formalize its outcome into blueprints and roadmaps, we are just getting started with feature implementation. Nevertheless, it collects a lot of new features and bugfixes that landed in our master branches since mid-September, when we froze features in preparation for the Folsom release.

Keystone is arguably where the most significant changes landed, with a tech preview of the new API version (v3), with policy and RBAC access enabled. A new ActiveDirectory/LDAP identity backend was also introduced, while the auth_token middleware is now shipped with the Python Keystone client.

In addition to fixing 185 bugs, the Nova crew removed nova-volume code entirely (code was kept in Folsom for compatibility reasons, but was marked deprecated). Virtualization drivers no longer directly access the database, as a first step towards completely isolating compute nodes from the database. Snapshots are now supported on raw and LVM disks, in addition to qcow2. On the hypervisors side, the Hyper-V driver grew ConfigDrive v2 support, while the XenServer one can now use BitTorrentas an image delivery mechanism.

The Glance client is no longer copied within Glance server (you can still find it with the Python client library), and the Glance SimpleDB driver reaches feature parity with the SQLAlchemy based one. A number of cleanups were implemented in Cinder, including in volume drivers code layout and API versioning handling.  Support for XenAPI storage manager for NFS is back, while the API grew a call to list bootable volumes and a hosts extension to allow service status querying.

The Quantum crew was also quite busy. The Ryu plugin was updated and now features tunnel support. The preparatory work to add advanced services was landed, as well as support for highly-available RabbitMQ queues. Feature parity gap with nova-network was reduced by the introduction of a Security Groups API.

Horizon saw a lot of changes under the hood, including unified configuration. It now supports Nova flavor extra specs. As a first step towards providing cloud admins with more targeted information, a system info panel was added. Oslo (formerly known as openstack-common) also saw a number of improvements. The config module (cfg) was ported to argparse. Common service management code was pushed to the Oslo incubator, as well as a generic policy engine.

That's only a fraction of what will appear in the final release of Grizzly, scheduled for April 2013. A lot of work was started in the last weeks but will only land in the next milestone. To get a glimpse of what's coming up, you can follow the Grizzly release status page !