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OpenStack Kilo arrives with an Ironic twist (no, really)

Bare-metal provisioning leads features of 11th major release

The eleventh version of OpenStack appeared on the project's official download servers on Thursday, arriving on time and bringing with it hundreds of new features for cloud-builders.

"As core of platform matures, focus turns to interoperability in the market, raising the bar for driver compatibility, and extending the platform to fit workloads with bare metal and containers," the OpenStack maintainers said in a statement accompanying the release.

This release, known as Kilo – where K is the eleventh letter of the alphabet – is the first major version of OpenStack to ship since the Juno release in October. It introduces 400 new features and includes input from 1,492 contributors representing 169 companies.

Perhaps its most prominent feature is that it introduces the first full release of Ironic, an API that can be used to provision workloads to run directly on server hardware, rather than in VMs. The OpenStack maintainers say Ironic is already in production use at some companies, including in Rackspace's OnMetal managed cloud offering, but with the new release it's ready for broader adoption.

The Neutron networking component has also been updated with version 2 of its load-balancing-as-a-service API and new features for network functions virtualization (NFV), which the project maintainers say is "the fastest-growing use case" for OpenStack.

Major updates have also been made to the Nova compute component, Swift object storage, Cinder block storage, and the Keystone identity service, and numerous other subsystems have also been improved. Descriptions of the major changes can be found in the official Kilo release notes, here.

Source code for the new release is available from the project's own website, and the major OpenStack distributions should begin switching over to Kilo in due course.

In fact, one major Linux distro has already made the leap. Ubuntu became the first OS to come bundled OpenStack Kilo when its 15.04 "Vivid Vervet" version shipped last week, just slightly ahead of the final Kilo release. ®

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