UPDATED 03:35 EDT / OCTOBER 16 2015

NEWS

OpenStack Liberty release intros ‘Big Tent’ governance model

The OpenStack community has just made a new release of its cloud computing framework available, adding dozens of new features that address large-scale deployments, native container capabilities and a new governance model.

Available now, OpenStack Liberty is the 12th release of the platform, succeeding the OpenStack Kilo release  from last April.

Liberty’s new features have made OpenStack even more powerful with regard to handling virtual machines (VMs). One of its chief components, the Nova Project for managing compute infrastructure, has introduced a new technology developed by Rackspace Inc. called “Cells”, which allows multiple Nova instances to be managed simultaneously. The feature will benefit those managing lots of small OpenStack deployments rather than those managing larger single deployments, and seems to reflect the demands of its biggest user base – telecommunications firms, which typically run lots of smaller clouds, OpenStack Foundation executive director Jonathan Bryce told eWeek.

Meanwhile, a new feature called Magnum makes it possible to deploy and run containers on OpenStack in a similar fashion to how Nova deploys and runs VMs. Magnum makes use of existing third-party tools like Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm for managing containers.

To handle container networking, there’s a newly enhanced Neutron networking component, plus a new Docker network plugin called Kuryr. With the update, Neutron now offers role-based access controls.

What with so many new components, OpenStack has introduced a new governance system called “Big Tent” that’s designed to encourage a more open-ended and competitive ecosystem for OpenStack. The main idea is that it allows users to better decided which pieces of the framework they need, and which ones they don’t. But while Liberty definitely packs more components than previous iterations, it’s uncertain if users will find the new model more accessible.

Nevertheless, OpenStack’s developers insist Big Tent is necessary as the project is becoming too big for many too deploy, yet too small to include all the features that people need.

As such, Big Tent aims to tag the components according to various factors, such as which ones are fully ‘mature’, which are massively scalable, and which are security-supported. We saw a provisional tagging system in the previous Kilo release, and now Liberty is the first release to use the system extensively.

Read more about Big Tent in this blog post from Mirantis Inc., one of the major OpenStack distributors.

Image credit: StockSnap via pixabay.com

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