OpenStack Ocata announced – then briefly withheld

Can build clouds, can't schedule email announcing stabilization release

The OpenStack Foundation has announced Ocata, its fifteenth edition. And then tried to un-announce it again.

The minor mess came about after the Foundation sent an email to reveal the update, complete with a download link to the new release.

About 30 minutes later came an email apologising “for the inconvenience” because “In our excitement, we hit 'SEND' too soon.” The inconvenience was that the link in the first email was dead and led to a rather fetching 404.

But enough of our sniping: what's in Ocata?

Not a lot, and that's by design: Ocata was designed to be a stabilization release aimed at addressing scalability and performance of OpenStack's core compute and networking services. The Foundation therefore suggests the following as the release's highlights:

• New Nova compute “placement” API that helps users intelligently allocate resources based on application needs. Cells v2 has also become default to increase scalability of Nova
• Horizon dashboard now supports keystone-to-keystone federation as new os-profiler UI, which gives operators the ability to detect performance issues across OpenStack services
• Auto-provisioning for Keystone federated identity dynamically creates a project and assigns a federated user a role upon successful authentication
• Ironic bare metal service becomes more robust with networking and driver enhancements
• Zaqar messaging service added Swift object storage as a backend to easily leverage an existing Swift cluster without deploying another MongoDB or Redis cluster
• Greatly improved performance and CPU usage for Telemetry projects: storing millions of metrics per second is now possible using Ceilometer with Gnocchi storage engine
• Active/Active HA in Cinder service can now be implemented by drivers
• Congress governance framework now has policy language enhancements to enable network address operations for better network and security governance

There's also plenty more for admirers of digital Tupperware – containers – in the form of support for Mesosphere DC/OS as a cluster type, plus Kubernetes allowing use of the latest SUSE distribution. OpenStack's now better at serving as a platform for microservices as a result of those and other changes.

What's next? As you read this, a Project Teams Gathering is taking place to discuss what needs doing in OpenStack 16, “Pike”.

Ocata was done in just four months to bring OpenStack's development schedule closer to the calendary year. We can therefore expect Pike mid-year.

This dead-at-the-time-of-writing link to Ocata should come alive on Wednesday February 23rd at 10:00 Central Time or 16:00 GMT.

You may or may may not care when it comes alive: Tristan Goode, the CEO of OpenStack-centric consultancy Aptira kindly spoke to The Reg from the beach and said "I can't ever recall us going 'oooo I can't wait for <release> so we can <blah>'." Aptira instead offers "StackBuffet", a continuous-integration-as-a-Service-driven cut of OpenStack that delivers customised OpenStack packages. ®