A Guide to Developer Contributions in the OpenStack Juno Blueprints

OpenStack is now having its twice a year event in Paris this week At the event, there is a developer summit that focuses on OpenStack’s technology direction. From these discussions, the developers start making the blueprints to get new features integrated into future releases. They also discuss bugs and fixes that are needed. Kilo is the next release, scheduled to be released April 30, 2015.

Atul has several years experience working on OpenStack. He is one of the earliest documentation core contributors. He started working on OpenStack following Cactus, the third release, which came out in April, 2011,  just after Bexar.  He erves as one of the community leads in India. He used that knowledge about OpenStack to define what he believes are the most interesting new features that were added by the community and overall benefit the project’s health. 

OpenStack Foundation, the governing body behind OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform, has announced its Juno release.  For those who are new to OpenStack, it is a technology stack which offers essential softwares that allows the user to pick and choose how to build their own public/private/hybrid cloud.

Nova

Nova is the compute part of OpenStack. Its blueprint suggests that 50 new features have been added to the project.

New features of interest:

1. Allow multiple interfaces to be attached to the same network.
2. Nova scheduler has been separated from Nova.  It is now its onw project called Gantt.
3. Security groups rule refactoring for handling RPC call in more scalable manner.
4. Make serial ports available to Openstack users from virtual machines.

Full blueprints list.

Glance

Glance is the image repository of the OpenStack project.  According to the Glance blueprint, five new features have been implemented.

New features of interest:

1. Restrict users from downloading image based on policy.
2. Implementation of metadata definition catalog.

Full blueprints list.

Swift

Swift is the object storage component of OpenStack. It was one of the core projects in the initial launch of OpenStack. It should be noted that Swift follows its own release cycle. As per Swift blueprint only 15 new features have been implemented

New features of interest:

1. Storage policy has been implemented.
2. Keystone V3 API is supported.
3. Parallel object auditor feature is implemented.

Full blueprints list.

Horizon

Horizon is the OpenStack dashboard which is used to manage and configure the entire lifecycle management. It is written in a Python/Django framework.  Fifty-one new features have been implemented.

New features of interest:

1. Sahara dashboard merged.
2. Implementation of role based access control support for Nova.
3. Support for swift volume backups
4. Functionality to migrate all instances off a host (evacuate host)

Full blueprints list.

Keystone

Keystone is the authentication component of OpenStack.  According to the Keystone blueprints, 23 new features have been implemented.

New features of interest:

1. Filtering of credentials by user id.
2. Keystone to Keystone federation.
3. Endpoint policy assignment.

Full blueprints list.

Neutron

Neutron drives networking component of OpenStack.  Acccording to the Neutron blueprint, 53 new features have been implemented.

New features of interest:

1. Improved security group implementation.
2. RPC messaging via oslo.messaging
3. High availability features on virtual routers.
4. Support for Extensions in ML2

Full blueprints list.

Cinder

Cinder project aims at providing persistent storage to instances. As per cinder blueprint 29 new features have been implemented.

New features of interest:

1. i18n-enablement, logs can be seen in many different languages
2. Limit bandwidth for volume copy for better instance performance.
3. Backup reset state enabled.
4. Replication support for cinder volume.

Full blueprints list.

Telemetry

Telemetry project aims at providing metering service to various OpenStack components. As per telemetry blueprint 26 new features have been implemented.

Features of interest:

1. Ionic notifications consumption by telemetry.
2. Improvement in SNMP inspector.
3. Inclusion of state of an instance in resource metadata.

Full blueprints list.

Heat

Heat aims to provide template based Orchestration for OpenStack components & overall lifecycle management of the components. As per heat blueprint 27 new features have been implemented.

New features of interest:

1. Swift TempURL deployment metadata polling.
2. Allow Heat to understand what networking service is available.
3. A resource to deploy configuration to a collection of servers.

Full blueprints list.

Trove

Trove project aims at providing Cloud Database as a Service provisioning functionality for both relational and non-relational database engines. As per trove blueprint 14 new features have been implemented.

New features of interest:

1. Replication V1 implementation for MySQL.
2. pluggable trove conductor manager.
3. Load extensions dynamically using stevedore.
4. Compliment the existing MySQL instances with PostgreSQL.

Full blueprints list.

Sahara

Sahara project provides a simple means to provision a data-intensive application cluster (Hadoop or Spark) on top of OpenStack. As per Sahara blueprint 32 new features have been implemented.

New features of interest:

1. Support of multi-region installation
2. Integration with telemetry
3. Persist sahara configuration in cluster object

Full blueprints list.

Feature image via Flickr Creative Commons.

Community Manager, Staff Writer @thenewstack

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