What will OpenStack Icehouse bring to the table?

What will be included in the next OpenStack release? Although many in the OpenStack community are still working on integrating features from Havana, such as improved telemetry via Ceilometer, the upcoming Icehouse version should be available by April 2014 and may include some important changes.

Randy Bias, CEO of Cloudscaling, a Seagate Cloud Builder Alliance partner, recently updated his State of the Stack presentation, reviewing recent adoption trends and technological changes. For Icehouse, he stated that the list of core OpenStack features will remain mostly unchanged and continue to include tools such as the Swift API, which is designed for retrieving large quantities of stored data, the block-based Cinder component and the Horizon dashboard.

This core feature list has been mostly static since the Folsom release, following the decision to allow new APIs and services to be added without expanding the core, so as to make the platform more amenable to users who just needed a basic infrastructure-as-a-service setup. In Havana, the Ceilometer and Heat features moved from the incubation to integration stage, and Bias expects that they’ll still be in that category in Icehouse, although they will be joined by several newcomers.

More specifically, the Ironic service for managing and provisioning bare-metal servers will reach integration, as will the Marconi project that serves an open alternative to queuing and notification systems. Savanna may enter the incubation category in Icehouse – this feature makes it easier to provision Hadoop clusters on top of OpenStack infrastructure.

However, there could be some changes within the OpenStack core in Icehouse. The Nova compute component is likely to be deprecated further as contributors focus more of their energies on Neutron, which provides networking-as-a-service between interface devices and other OpenStack services. These changes will be increasingly meaningful now that the OpenStack community has more than 1,000 developers, with 910 contributors having worked on Havana alone.

2014-01-21T10:42:48+00:00

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