The OpenStack community will discuss the next release in Barcelona.

The OpenStack community has released Newton, the 14th version of the most widely used open source software for building clouds.

New features in bare metal provisioning service 'Ironic', container orchestration cluster manager 'Magnum', and container networking project 'Kuryr' enable more seamless integration of containers and virtual/physical infrastructure under a single control plane.

Organizations in heterogeneous environments that require a developer environment that can quickly and effectively leverage new technologies like containers and workloads requiring virtual machines or high-availability architectures can apply these new capabilities to a wider range of use cases.

In addition to improving the user experience for container cluster management and networking, Newton also enhances scalability and resiliency. These new features will be showcased at the OpenStack Summit, taking place in Barcelona, Spain, from October 25th to 28th.

Improved scalability, reduced architectural and functional barriers

The launch of Newton will reduce architectural and functional barriers to scalability across platforms and locations. This will further solidify OpenStack's position as a solution for any cloud, regardless of size. Improvements include scale-up/down capabilities in Nova, Horizon, and Swift, improvements to Nava Cells V2 for horizontal scale-out, native convergence in Heat, and improved multi-tenancy capabilities in Ironic.

Newton offers notable high availability, adaptability, and enhanced self-healing capabilities, ensuring operators can maintain stability regardless of workload. Projects that significantly improve availability include Cinder, Ironic, Neutron, and Trove. Security features have also been enhanced, with Keystone offering upgrades such as PCI compliance and encrypted credentials. Cinder adds support for re-encrypting encrypted volumes to unencrypted volumes and vice versa. Cinder also includes improvements such as micro version support, cascading snapshot volume deletion, and a backup service that supports multi-instance coordination.

Newton will evolve OpenStack into a single cloud platform for virtualization, bare metal, and containers. It also improves usability for operators and app developers, facilitating automated installation, operation, changes, and modifications of OpenStack. Magnum provides provisioning for container orchestration such as Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesos, and includes new features such as operator-centric installation guides, pluggable driver support, support for Kubernetes clusters on bare metal servers, and asynchronous cluster creation. Ironic, for general bare metal provisioning, adds multi-tenant networking and tight integration with Magnum, Kubernetes, and Nova, and Kolla now supports bare metal.

Kuryr adds Neutron networking capabilities to containers, enabling Swarm and Kubernetes integration for the first time. Another notable feature of Kuryr is the ability to add virtual machines through integration with Magnum and Neutron (initial release). To support popular communication network configurations, VLAN-aware virtual machines allow enterprises to run existing VNFs on OpenStack clouds and secure traffic using per-tenant VLANs. Nova adds mutable configuration settings, allowing operators to reload specific configuration parameters without restarting nodes. Nova's get-me-a-network feature also simplifies network configuration.

“The OpenStack community is very focused on improving cloud workloads for users,” said Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation. “OpenStack’s commitment to this is evident in Newton, where users’ biggest needs are addressed, delivering improved security, resiliency, and choice for cloud operators and app developers,” he said. “The new features and enhancements in Newton clearly demonstrate the power of OpenStack to power more workloads across industries worldwide. OpenStack is the cloud platform that ties together compute, network, storage, and innovative cloud technologies.”

OpenStack Newton was designed and developed by an international community of 2,581 developers, operators, and users from 309 organizations. The OpenStack ecosystem will begin releasing products and services based on Newton in the coming months. Users can find officially certified OpenStack Powered distributions and cloud service providers that have completed interoperability testing in the OpenStack Marketplace. To preview Newton, visitors can view a live demo or download the open source code on the website.