OpenStack Newton release: what’s next for Horizon, Ironic and Kolla

Each release cycle, OpenStack project team leads (PTLs) introduce themselves, talk about upcoming features for the OpenStack projects they manage, plus how you can get involved and influence the roadmap.

Superuser will feature weekly summaries of the videos; you can also catch them on the OpenStack Foundation YouTube channel. This post covers Horizon, Ironic and Kolla.

Horizon

What: Horizon
provides a web-based user interface to OpenStack services including Nova, Swift, Glance, etc.

Who: Rob Cresswell PTL. Day Job: Software engineer, Cisco Systems.

Burning issues

“With Horizon, we’ve got an ongoing move to Angular JS and a JavaScript client-side framework,” he says.”This has always been quite contentious because it’s basically resulted in this big rewrite of the project.”

What’s next

“When you start looking into the admin view and work across many projects and regions at once, it tends to get very non-performant,” he adds.

What matters in Newton

We’ve got some small tweaks to make in the Python and Django work in order to improve the admin groundwork and we are also making adjustments to the way we are handling plugins, settings theming, he says.

Get involved!

Use Ask OpenStack for general questions

For roadmap or development issues, subscribe to the OpenStack development mailing list, and use the tag [horizon]

Participate in the weekly meetings: held in #openstack-meeting-3 on Wednesdays at 2000 UTC.

Ironic

What: Ironic
provisions bare metal machines that may be used independently or as part of an OpenStack Cloud.

Who: Jim Rollenhagen PTL. Day job: Software developer, Rackspace

Burning issues

Networking is always our hottest topic, he says. We had a ton of discussion about that, but our other big topic was testing and making our continuous integration better and more reliable.

What’s next

“We are looking into how we can make operations more automated in Ironic,” he says.

What matters in Newton

“[Beyond improving our networking and operator experience] we are also working on our Nova integration,” he added. “I think it’s going to be even better than what we designed last time.”

Get involved!

Use Ask OpenStack for general questions

For roadmap or development issues, subscribe to the OpenStack development mailing list, and use the tag [ironic]

Participate in the weekly meetings: held in #openstack-meeting on Wednesdays at 1700 UTC.

Kolla

What: Kolla
provides production-ready containers and deployment tools for operating OpenStack clouds that are scalable, fast, reliable, and upgradable using community best practices.

Who: Steven Dake PTL. Day job: Software engineer, Cisco Systems

Burning issues

“Kolla, at the current moment, has a big gap,” he says. “And the big gap is that it does not deploy bare metal.”

What’s next

“This is all about manageability,” he adds. “All of our features are designed to make Kolla more manageable.”

What matters in Newton

Although we are working towards increased manageability, our number one priority right now is Ansible 2.0, he says. “That is to move with the rest with the rest of the universe on software.”