OpenStack's "Diablo" release adds dashboard, identity, networking

OpenStack has announced the fourth release (Diablo) of its Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform. The three core parts of the architecture – OpenStack Compute (Nova), OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) and OpenStack Image Service (Glance) – introduced in the previous three releases (Austin, Bexar and Cactus), have all received updates and are joined by three incubating projects, Dashboard, Keystone and Quantum.

The Dashboard project, led by Nebula, provides a user interface for the self-service provisioning resources, while the Keystone project, led by RackSpace, provides a bridge between OpenStack components and existing authentication systems; both are to be promoted to core projects in the next release of OpenStack, "Essex". A video from OpenStack shows the Dashboard in use.

OpenStack Dashboard demonstrated (source: OpenStack)

The Quantum project gives access to an API for requesting and configuring virtual networks; it is a newer project than Dashboard and Keystone and will continue being incubated in the next release. It allows virtual networks to be configured between the compute and storage resources, allowing for simpler, abstracted networking.

With the existing core components, Nova has been enhanced by the addition of a distributed scheduler which stops scheduling being a single point of failure in a high availability network; support for Keystone has also been added. Swift now has a more granular synchronisation system allowing specific containers to be selected and Glance has new filtering and searching capabilities, accessible through the API, for systems where a large number of images are being managed.

OpenStack now has 110 member companies and counts over 1500 individuals within its community. OpenStack's code is released under an Apache licence.

See also:

• HP begins beta of OpenStack-based services, a report from The H.
• Cisco and OpenStack, a feature from The H.
• Dell crowbars open its OpenStack solution, a report from The H.

(djwm)