OpenStack Mitaka, the 13th Version, Arrives

The evolution of OpenStack continues. The OpenStack community has released Mitaka, the 13th version of the open cloud platform, with a focus on manageability, scalability and end-user experience. The latest version is positioned as "an integration engine that can manage bare metal, virtual machines, and container orchestration frameworks with a single set of APIs."

The Mitaka release is evidence of how powerful a converged open source community can be. This release was designed and built by an international community of 2,336 developers, operators and users from 293 organizations.

OpenStack is coming up on the sixth anniversary of its launch, and the project is now mature with a stable core, although some organizations are still seeking more hardened security. Recent development efforts by the OpenStack community have been focused largely on making the software easier to deploy, manage and scale. 

According to the announcement of Mitaka:

"The Mitaka release includes numerous advancements that focus on improving day-to-day ease of use for cloud deployers and administrators. One highlight is a simplified configuration for the Nova compute service that introduces additional standard defaults and reduces the number of options that must be manually selected. The Keystone identity service, too, has been greatly simplified, with multi-step processes for setting up the identity management features of a cloud network—installing, running, authenticating, distributing tokens, etc.—streamlined into a one-step process. Another example of the enhanced manageability available in Mitaka is found in Neutron, which now features improved Layer 3 networking and Distributed Virtual Router (DVR) support."

"Mitaka also features continued advancements for scaling OpenStack clouds. For example, Heat’s convergence engine, which first appeared in the Liberty release, can now handle larger loads and more complex actions for horizontal scaling, while delivering better performance for stateless operations. Similarly, in Keystone, fernet tokens increase the number of API operations the identity service can support. Developers also made significant progress on Cells v2, another feature introduced in Liberty that aids in horizontally scaling out OpenStack compute clouds."

 The OpenStack ecosystem will begin rolling out products and services based on OpenStack Mitaka in the coming weeks and months. Users can find OpenStack-powered distributions and cloud service providers that meet interoperability tests in the OpenStack Marketplace.

To preview Mitaka, download the open source code here. And, don't miss our guide to open cloud computing, found here.