The Icehouse release of OpenStack focused on improving the user experience and operational capabilities. It included stability enhancements and bug fixes for core projects like Nova, Neutron, Glance, Cinder, and Swift. New features were added for many services, such as scheduler improvements in Nova, policy-based storage in Swift, and alarming capabilities in Ceilometer. The release also incubated several new projects, including Sahara, Barbican, Marconi, and continued development of TripleO, Ironic, and other underlying projects.

5. What’s included in IceHouse Release?

6. Networking
(Neutron)
Orchestration
(Heat)
Telemetry
(Ceilometer)
Block
Storage
(Cinder)
Dashboard
(Horizon)
Identity
(Keystone)
Image
Service
(Glance)
Object
Storage
(Swift)
Compute
(Nova)
Database
Service
(Trove)
Oslo
TripleO
Devstack
Bare Metal
(Ironic)
Data
Processing
(Sahara)
Key
Management
(Barbican)
Queue
Service
(Marconi)
QA
IceHouse Release
Incubated

7. The Icehouse Release
Focus on the user (customer) and the operators
Operational enhancements (upgradability, manageability)
Lots of bug fixes and stability improvements
Integration/incubation of even more services (18!)
Check out the latest User Survey
http://www.slideshare.net/ryan-lane/openstack-atlanta-user-survey

8. Current User’s interests (according to survey)
● Stability of core should be a priority above adding new functions
● Add how-to guides, problem management documentation, expire old documentation, end
user guide (but much less than previous surveys)
● Zero downtime migrations
● Installation and configuration
● Cross Project consistency with APIs, SDKs and CLIs
● High availabilityVMs
● Neutron stability, simplification, resilience, IPv6 and scalability
● Improved function and usability in Horizon
● Security, auditing
● AWS/EC2 compatibility

9. New features!
Full story here: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/ReleaseNotes/Icehouse

10. Swift
● Discoverable-capabilities
○ Supports the /info URL, which reports back the cluster supported features and status.
● Persistent system metadata
○ Performed at a system-level (i.e. xattr), will allow advanced middleware operations, like on demand migration or
server side encryption
● Diskfile abstraction
○ Different storage implementation (besides regular filesystem), like gluster or Seagate Kinetic
● Storage policies
○ For all rings (accounts, containers, objects)
○ Allows different replication schemas
○ Future user-defined erasure encoding support
● Account level ACL and ACL v2 (JSON format)
● Ssync replication (alternative to rsync)
○ It will allow future improvements of replication subsystem
● Automatic retry on read failures
Nova
Glance
Horizon
Keystone
Neutron
Cinder
Ceilometer
Heat
Trove
Swift

11. Nova
Glance
Horizon
Keystone
Neutron
Cinder
Ceilometer
Heat
Trove
Swift
Nova
● Better upgrade support (i.e. rolling upgrade)
● Some small features added to Hyper-V, Xen, VMWare backends
● KVM enhancements
○ Passing of boot-time kernel arguments stored in glance metadata
○ Virtio-scsi instead of virtio-blk
○ Virtio-rng (random number generator)
○ Specify video device
○ Watchdog device
○ better Neutron events handling and integration
● Scheduler
○ Server instance groups: affinity and anti-affinity filters
○ New host affinity filter according to namespaces found in image metadata
○ Improved weight normalization (free RAM or used CPU priorities)
○ Work in progress: split scheduler from Nova, new Gantt project
● Exposure of the hypervisor IP address
● XML support deprecated
● Other features
○ More and better notifications
○ File injection deprecated: use ConfigDrives or metatada servers (cloud-init) instead
○ Docker driver code moved to another repository (considered now as a plugin)

12. Glance
● Improved calculation of image usage quotas (ignore deleted images)
● New concept of ‘image location’ for faster consommation
● Splitting of size in 2 concepts: image_size (compressed or QCOW2) and virtual_size
(exploded or RAW)
● Fix to JSON pointer syntax (0-based instead of 1-based)
● VMWare backend improvement
Nova
Glance
Horizon
Keystone
Neutron
Cinder
Ceilometer
Heat
Trove
Swift

13. Horizon
● i18n: Horizon is now available in Hindi, German and Serbian. Updated translations for
Australian English, British English, Dutch, French, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese,
Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Spanish and Russian.
● Ceilometer reports
● Other
○ Django 1.6
○ RDP console support
○ AngularJS as frontend
● UX
○ UI updated
○ Navigation enhancements
○ Wizard for multi-step operations
○ Inline table edits
Nova
Glance
Horizon
Keystone
Neutron
Cinder
Ceilometer
Heat
Trove
Swift

14. Keystone
● New v3 API features (v2 still considered stable)
○ Federated athentication via Shibboleth
○ Password change
● Backend separation:
○ assignment backend (authorization data, i.e. in SQL)
○ identity backend (authentication data, i.e. in LDAP)
● KVS driver supports more backends: Redis, Cassandra or MongoDB
● Group-based role assignment when using LDAP
● Handle external authentication via REMOTE_USER (multi-domain deployments)
● Upgrade notes
○ S3 token middleware deprecated
○ Default token expiration reduced from 24h to 1h
● Other
○ Events revocation
○ Keystone event audits for record (CADF)
○ Regions API: allow deployers to specify a hierarchy of deployment regions
Nova
Glance
Horizon
Keystone
Neutron
Cinder
Ceilometer
Heat
Trove
Swift

15. Neutron
● New drivers
○ General: IBM SDN-VE, Nuage, OpenConvergence, OpenDaylight
○ LBaaS: Embrane, NetScaler, Radware
○ VPNaaS: Cisco CSR
● Improve functional testing in Tempest, mandatory QA for all drivers
● Deprecation of Linux Bridge and OVS plugins, use ML2
● Nova notifications and better integration
● XML format deprecation, use JSON
Nova
Glance
Horizon
Keystone
Neutron
Cinder
Ceilometer
Heat
Trove
Swift

16. Cinder
● Change the type of an existing volume on-the-fly
● Import/export backups
● Support for metadata in backup objects
● Delete quota for a specific tenant
● New Fiber Channel Zone manager
● Update encryption of volumes
● Ceilometer notifications
Nova
Glance
Horizon
Keystone
Neutron
Cinder
Ceilometer
Heat
Trove
Swift

17. Ceilometer
● Alarming improvements
○ Time-constrained alarms
■ i.e. higher bars on weekdays, more relaxed at night or weekends)
○ Exclude weak samples, those with abnormal low values
○ Derived rate-based meters (like IOPS, kbps, etc)
● Feature parity in storage backends HBase, SQLAlchemy and DB2 Drivers
● Upgrade notes
○ Split from collector a new notification agent
○ New pipeline configuration (decouple sources from sinks)
■ allows pluggable resource discovery
● API
○ Complex filter expression in API query.
○ Direct API to samples
○ New aggregate functions for statistics, like standard deviation
● New metric sources
○ Neutron north-bound API on SDN controller
○ VMware vCenter Server API
○ SNMP daemons on baremetal hosts
○ OpenDaylight REST APIs
Nova
Glance
Horizon
Keystone
Neutron
Cinder
Ceilometer
Heat
Trove
Swift

18. Heat
● New HOT format (yaml) is now the preferred vs CFN format (json)
● A lot of new resouces: software configuration, autoscaling, openstack resources
● Non-admin usage of Heat (requires keystone domains)
● New operator API
● Stack abandon and adopt without affecting the actual resources
● More notifications, for events or triggers
● Stack preview: simulate a stack creation
● File inclusion (i.e. cloud-init)
● The preferred ‘Deferred authentication method’ is now Trust, avoids passwords in templates
Nova
Glance
Horizon
Keystone
Neutron
Cinder
Ceilometer
Heat
Trove
Swift

19. Trove
● User/Schema management for MySQL backend via the Trove API
● Resize support for both Trove instance flavor and linked cinder volumes
● Multiple datastore support
○ Full support: MySQL and Percona
○ Experimental: MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra and CouchBase
● Configuration groups, to apply them to a set of instances
● Backups and Restore support (full or incremental), leverages Swift containers
● Optional DNS support via Designate
Nova
Glance
Horizon
Keystone
Neutron
Cinder
Ceilometer
Heat
Trove
Swift

20. Incubated projects

21. ● Ironic (Baremetal provisioning)
○ Stable release in IceHouse
○ Distribution of nodes being provisioned to avoid saturation
○ Maintenance mode for temporary node decomission
○ Periodically poll for power status of all nodes, enforce OFF status for unresponsive ones (IPMI)
● Marconi (message/notifications -aaS)
○ Codebase from Rackspace Cloud Queues. Version 1.0 ready
○ Support for multiple patterns (pub/sub for notifications, producer/consumer for tasks)

22. ● Sahara (Hadoop -aaS) - old Savanna
○ New for icehouse: incubated requirements fullfilled (gates, tempest, etc)
○ Heat provisioning support
○ Hadoop 2.x support
○ Interesting features:
■ Swift storage for Hadoop clusters
■ Define cluster attribures via API (i.e. heap memory, cluster size)
■ Full support for multiple job formats (hive, pig, jar-file, etc)
● Barbican (secret management -aaS)
○ Part of a bigger CloudKeep project. Deals with simmetric key, assymetric key or Raw secrets
○ Supports transparent encryption for Cinder volumes. Swift objects too
○ Message signing
○ Support extra features via other tools: KIMP, Symantec CA (SSL certs), Dogtag, certmonger

23. Underlying projects

24. ● Oslo
○ more and more stuff :)
● TripleO
○ Major feature improvements. Now part of HP Helion installer
○ Use of Ironic for bare metal provisoning
○ diskimage-build as a tool for golden images
○ Tuskar as a dedicated project for controlled provisioning/orchestration of cloud resources
● Devstack
● QA projects
○ Tempest
○ Gerrit & Jenkins
○ Gating & Zuul

25. Other (interesting) external projects

26. ● Designate
○ DNS as a Service - similar to Route 53
● Manila
○ Filesystem as a Service (NFS/CIFS)
● Rally
○ Benchmarking for Openstack (automated deployment/tempest verification/performance benchmarking)
● Blazar (Climate)
○ Reource reservation / capacity leasing
● Anvil
○ Refactored devstack, sort of a packaging tool for Openstack
● Satori
○ Configuration discovery (inspection of VMs, network settings, etc)
● Libra
○ Advanced LBaaS, configures HAProxy clusters using Nova VMs
● Gantt
○ Advanced Scheduling for Nova (VM placement)
● Mistral - TaskFlow
○ Like Amazon SWF, Workflow as a service: task scheduling (cron), environment deployment, long-running processes...
● Congress
○ Policy as a service: ensure business-defined policies and governance across cloud users

27. A note on PaaS

28. Don’t have ‘one PaaS to rule them all’ yet
● Solum
● CloudFoundry and its variants (pivotal, stackato, etc)
● Openshift
● Juju
● Cloudify
● AppScale
● Based on just Docker
○ Project Atomic
○ CoreOS
○ Deis.io
○ Dokku
○ Decker (for CloudFoundry)
○ flynn.io
○ maestrodev
(Note: as the definition of PaaS is vage, so is the classification, we included here Ops orchestration tools as well)

29. Thanks!