Give us Liberty, or give us death!

Over the course of the past six months, since our Kilo upgrade, we’ve seen continued rapid adoption of our OpenStack cloud here at GoDaddy, with eight new production services onboard and over 25 percent growth every month. We are continually finding new ways to use the platform as we expand our offering.

Additionally, we continue to contribute our expertise back to the community. For instance, two of our developers recently became reviewers for core OpenStack projects.

Our excitement for the Liberty release continues to grow. With every release, we continue to see significant improvements in overall stability and enhancements across projects. In particular in Liberty, we are looking forward to progress on Nova Cells v2. As an early adopter of cells, v1 was a good start but definitely had room for improvement to work well at scale. The changes coming in v2 look like a great set of features and fixes that will make cells more valuable for our scenarios.

We’ve also been doing quite a bit of research and experimentation with containers on OpenStack. Many of our services are better suited for containers versus bare metal or virtual machines (VMs), so having an option for developers that is well integrated with OpenStack is a requirement.

We’ve recently stood up Magnum, seeing the project as a great way to introduce both native container support and orchestration to our platform. The work the Magnum team has done in Liberty looks really promising, making great headway towards becoming a production service. We are excited to see the end results and also to get more involved with the project in the community.

And of course, each release comes with a slew of bug fixes and merged patches that we will no longer have to maintain locally. We’re glad to participate in the feedback loop of cloud developers identifying and fixing bugs to send back to the upstream projects—it’s one of the great advantages of being members of the OpenStack community.

October 2015 will be an exciting month with the Liberty release and the Summit! In Tokyo, we are looking forward to hearing more about Liberty changes and participating in the Mitaka design sessions. We can’t wait to bring Liberty to our platform!