The OpenStack Pike release is currently scheduled to arrive September 1, and it will bring many new feature and improvements. In a session at the OpenStack Summit in Boston, the top 8 new features that will be in OpenStack Pike were revealed. They include:

1. Extend Volume While Attached

Pete Chadwick, director of product management at SUSE, said a requirement from users has been the ability to add storage to an existing Cinder volume without needing to shut down a virtual machine.



"We think this is a huge usability improvement," Chadwick said.

2. Archiving Old Documentation

Shamail Tahir, director of product management at Athena Health, said there has been a concerted effort to archive older documentation on docs.openstack.org. Tahir noted many users are not running the latest OpenStack release, which is why it is increasingly important to have all of the older documentation.

3. Ironic and Neutron Integration

Ironic is the OpenStack bare-metal service, while Neutron provides networking functionality.



"This enables a bare-metal server to plug into an existing Neutron networking framework so you can have a consistent networking model with virtual machines," Chadwick said.

4. Unified Limit Support in Keystone

The OpenStack Keystone identity service is set to benefit from new unified limit support for better quota usability across other OpenStack services.



"When you're at a large scale, quota management becomes difficult because each project implements its own view of what the quota data is," Tahir said.



What is now happening for OpenStack Pike is that the Keystone team has now built a unified limits support system that bring in all the quota limit controls in Keystone.

5. Live VM Migration

The Neutron Networking and Nova Compute project are working together to enable live VM migration between heterogenous networking backends for better mixed hardware environment support.

6. Support for Multiple Cells in Nova

Tahir explained that in Nova there is the notion of Cells, which is a mechanism to help provide increased scale. He added that in the OpenStack Ocata release, there was no way to provide multiple cells as Nova only supported single Cell deployments.



"Now in the Pike release the model has been scaled so you can take advantage of multiple cells," Tahir said.

7. Swift Object Container Sharing

Chadwick explained that as Swift usage grows within a given OpenStack deployment, over time the data storage gets to be very large. With the new sharing capabilities, some of the data that is stored in one container can be split across multiple containers.

8. Kuryr-Kubernetes and Kuryr-Libnetwork

The OpenStack Kuryr Project provides a networking API that acts as a mapping layer for container networking APIs to the OpenStack Neutron networking API model. In the Pike release there will be improvement to two critical container mappings with Kubernetes and Docker's Libnetwork.





Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.



