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OpenStack Newton: A new landmark for open source

The community takes a tour of the latest OpenStack release, named after an historic home in Texas.

October 7, 2016
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The latest OpenStack release, called Newton, has opened its doors. Named after an historic house in Austin, Texas, OpenStack’s 14th release was designed, hammered and painted by an international community of 2,581 developers, operators and users from 309 organizations.

OpenStack now offers greater scalability, resiliency and user experience to support a wider variety of workloads. With notable advancements across several projects including Magnum, Kuryr and Ironic, Newton upholds OpenStack as the single cloud platform to manage virtual machines (VMs), bare metal and containers and further enhances scalability and resiliency requirements shared by users.


But what did the community have to say about it?

Many are excited about the big reveal and, as they toured the new features, here are some first reactions.

In his guide to the OpenStack Newton release, Brad Topol, a distinguished engineer at IBM, said that OpenStack Newton “will most certainly be remembered as the point in time when OpenStack proved undeniably that it is capable of supporting a large domain of workloads across a broadly expanding set of industries” citing OpenStack users including State Grid, JFE Steel, Betfair and Snapdeal.

Topol also mentioned the work of the Interop Working Group (previously the DefCore Working Group) and its focus on interoperability for this release with the addition of new testing specifications that provide greater emphasis on both workload portability and user experience and the creation of an interoperability challenge. The challenge was a “cross-community effort [and its goal] was to demonstrate interoperability of OpenStack cloud environments through the deployment and execution of several sample enterprise workloads across multiple vendor’s OpenStack clouds.”

Pete Chadwick, SUSE’s director of product management went back to Physics 101 to parallel OpenStack and Newton’s laws of motion. “If anything in the IT world has inertia, it is enterprise applications and workloads,” and with enhancements around Manila and high availability, Chadwick says OpenStack Newton “makes it easier to move these workloads into a cloud infrastructure without going through costly rewrites.”

With the marketplace, budget and technology acting as forces impacting today’s IT organizations, Chadwick says that Magnum’s new capabilities enable organizations to adapt to changes quickly, accelerating development and deployment of business services for internal and external customers.

Techcrunch also featured Magnum enhancements as a key feature of the OpenStack Newton release, highlighting the integration with Ironic to support multi-tenant networking.

“The Magnum project for managing containers on OpenStack, which already supported Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and Mesos, now also allows operators to run Kubernetes clusters on bare metal servers, while the Ironic framework for provisioning those bare metal servers is now more tightly integrated with Magnum and also now supports multi-tenant networking.”

And for resiliency, Computerworld discussed several projects that delivered new features for high availability, adaptability, and self-healing in Newton.

“The Cinder, Ironic, Neutron, and Trove services have all gained better high availability functionality, while several components have gained improved security as well. Keystone, for example, now offers upgrades that include PCI compliance and encrypted credentials. Cinder adds support for retyping encrypted to unencrypted volumes and vice versa.”

This is just a fraction of the project updates and community, industry reactions from yesterday’s launch of OpenStack Newton. For more feature updates, visit the release landing page and check out the bite-sized community reactions from Twitter below.

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