The open source OpenStack project that wants to become the most popular stack for private cloud deployments has just shipped out its latest release.

OpenStack Newton, the 14th version of the open-source software platform that’s used for building OpenStack clouds, comes with a number of enhancements aimed at improving scalability and resiliency.

The project developers said in a press release that one of the main barriers companies face in trying to scale up or down their clouds have to do with the platform’s architecture and functionality. Newton has removed those limitations by including new scaling capabilities in its Horizon, Nova and Swift components, the developers said.

New features improve the horizontal scale-out capability of Nova compute environments, while convergence by default has been added to the Heat orchestration service. There are also multi-tenancy improvements in the Ironic component.

As for resiliency, OpenStack Newton gains improved high availability, adaptability and self-healing capabilities. Cinder, Ironic, Neutron, and Trove have been updated with enhancement high availability functionality, and there have been security improvements made to several other components. One of those is Keystone, which now comes with PCI compliance and encrypted credentials, while Cinder gains support for retyping unencrypted to encrypted volumes and vice versa. In addition, Cinder has also been boosted with micro-version support, a backup service that can be scaled to cover multiple instances, and the ability to delete snapshots via the cascading feature.

OpenStack has also delivered on its promise to make the software easier to install, operate, adapt and fix with new automation capabilities. For example, the Magnum component comes with a new installation guide, support for Kubernetes cluster on bare metal servers, support for pluggable drivers and asynchronous cluster creation. Meanwhile, Ironic gains multi-tenant networking and tighter integration with Kubernetes, Magnum and Nova, which should enable much easier bare-metal provisioning.

Elsewhere, the Kolla component can now be deployed onto bare metal servers, while Neutron networking capabilities are available on containers via Kuryr. That also makes Kubernetes and Swarm integration available for the first time.

With most OpenStack vendors having only just released updated versions of their distros based on the last OpenStack Mitaka release, it’s likely to be several months before we see any releases of products and services based on this new version.

The developers have posted a video to YouTube demonstrating many of the new capabilities in OpenStack Newton:

The platform’s capabilities will also be demonstrated at the upcoming OpenStack Summit, on Oct. 25-28, in Barcelona.

Image credit: The William Blake Archive via Wikipedia