OpenStack Newton debuts, claims to run anything at almost any scale Containers? VMs? Bare metal? Huge scale? Small scale? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes The fourteenth release of OpenStack, “Newton”, is upon us.

This time around the OpenStack Foundation is pointing out that the platform can run and manage just about anything. Or to be more precise and use the the language the Foundation prefers, “manage bare metal, virtual machines, and container orchestration frameworks with a single set of APIs.”

“The new features and enhancements in Newton underscore the power of OpenStack,” says Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. “It handles more workloads in more ways across more industries worldwide.”

The additions offered as most significant include:

Improved self-healing and therefore high availability across components like Cinder (block storage), Ironic (bare metal provisioning), Neutron (virtual networking) and Trove (database-as-a-service);

The Magnum container service can now provision three container orchestration tools, namely Swarm, Kubernetes and Mesos;

Nova can now scale up to greater heights and is better at horizontal scale, and also scale down more easily;

Numerous security improvements such as the addition of retyping encrypted to unencrypted volumes and vice versa in Cinder, plus PCI-compliant enhancements to the Keystone identity service;

Nested virtualisation in the Kuyr networking-for-Docker plugin.

The Foundation publishes stats recording who contributes to OpenStack and comparing the Newton and previous Mitaka release shows there's a hard corporate core of contributors doing most of the work. Here's data from those two releases.

Newton Mitaka Mirantis 38,214 Mirantis 52,531 Red Hat 31,722 HPE 22,467 HPE 18,421 IBM 21,784 Rackspace 17,403 Red Hat 20,744 IBM 14,461 Rackspace 12,399 Intel 10,196 Huawei 8,095 Huawei 7,443 Intel 7,054 Independent 5,255 NEC 5,879 SUSE 5,044 Independent 5,618 NEC 4,516 SUSE 4,952

Onwards, then, to OpenStack Ocata, due in late February 2017. Plenty of work on what goes in will happen at the OpenStack summit taking place in Barcelona late this month. ®