Last month's launch of the open-source OpenStack project garnered a great deal of attention from the media and cloud followers, as it promised a new option for building and launching their own internal and hosted clouds.
This week, Chief Stacker Jim Curry posted an update on the OpenStack blog, outlining what new updates and features will be released in the new version, expected to land on October 21.
The official version of the OpenStack API. In addition to the functionality available in the Rackspace Cloud API, OpenStack will be add functionality related to role-based access controls and networking actions. Support for the Amazon Web Services APIs will remain as a subproject.
Hypervisor and image support. The new release will include support for multiple hypervisors: XenServer, KVM, UML and VirtualBox.
Unified approach to storage. The authentication system for both Compute and Object Storage will be unified.
Two network models The API will allow users to choose their networking model: statically assigned, real Internet Protocol addresses; or private IP addresses within a dedicated subnet, connected via NATing from a private VPN to the public Internet.
In addition to the features above, the release has been broadly refactored in order to make the code base more developer-friendly and encourage contributions.
OpenStack has a lot of momentum and support behind it, and it's great to see the project evolving so quickly. For those interested in more, a design conference will take place in San Antonio, Texas, November 9 through 12.