The 11th Release of OpenStack, Kilo, Debuts

The 11th release of OpenStack is available for download today, and the event is being billed as "a turning point" for the open source project with contributions from nearly 1,500 developers and 169 organizations worldwide. Indeed, it's only been a few short years since there was early media coverage of the cloud computing platform.

The new Kilo version of the platform offers greater stability and can scale more easily. It also features the full release of the bare metal service Ironic, for provisioning workloads that require direct access to hardware.

The Kilo release takes place at a time when production deployments compose half of OpenStack deployments, and network functions virtualization (NFV) is the fastest-growing use case for OpenStack cloud software. Production deployments continue to grow, with companies like eBay operating OpenStack at large scale.

As developer productivity becomes a competitive necessity for every company, cloud technology is quickly evolving to enable that transformation. Companies want to build on a solid cloud infrastructure foundation that scales while providing the opportunity to embrace emerging technologies. OpenStack Kilo is billed as purpose-built for this “software-defined economy,” where agile cloud resources support app developers and software innovation further up the stack.

“OpenStack continues to grow, and features like federated identity and bare metal provisioning support make the platform more compelling for enterprise IT leadership and application developers who want a stable, open source alternative to proprietary options,” said Al Sadowski, research director, 451 Research.

Nova Compute, in Kilo, is worth taking note of. Kilo offers new API versioning management with v2.1 and microversions to provide strongly validated API definitions. This is supposed to make it easier to write long-lived applications against compute functionality. Major operational improvements include live upgrades when a database schema change is required, in addition to better support for changing the resources of a running VM.

Identity federation enhancements also work across public and private clouds to support hybrid workloads in multi-cloud environments. 

Ubuntu 15.04 and several other offerings are already showing up with Kilo integrated,  and we'll be hearing much more about the new release of the platform.