At the OpenStack Summit in Paris from Nov. 3 to 7, there was a lot of discussion about both the present and the future of OpenStack. The immediate future for OpenStack is the Kilo release, due out in the first half of 2015.
In a video interview with eWEEK at the event, the OpenStack Foundation’s Jonathan Bryce, executive director, and Mark Collier, chief operating officer, detailed what’s next for the open-source cloud platform.
The big new project that is set to debut with the OpenStack Kilo release is the Ironic project, which brings new bare-metal server capabilities to OpenStack.
“It’s pretty cool to have that [Ironic] in there, especially as we look at the kinds of workloads that people are starting to run on OpenStack,” Bryce said.
The ability to run on bare metal can potentially provide additional performance for compute-intensive workloads like big data processing. In addition to Ironic, Bryce said that there are a lot of little details that will make the Kilo release more useful for cloud operators, too.
OpenStack has many large users at this point, including Comcast, Bloomberg and Best Buy, and Bryce noted that those organizations now have cloud environments that are increasingly growing. As those users grow their environments, OpenStack benefits as the lessons and requirements of large-scale operations trickle down to the technical details.
Another key focus in the Kilo cycle is to continue to develop and expand a consistent experience across all OpenStack projects. Bryce noted that at the Paris Summit a lot of time was dedicated to cross-project planning.
Security is always a focus for OpenStack at multiple levels. There is currently the Barbican project in development that will provide an additional layer of security capabilities for OpenStack. Bryce noted that Barbican is now an official incubated project at OpenStack, though it is not yet scheduled to be integrated for the Kilo release.
Overall security is an area within both current and future OpenStack releases, where there will be a need for integrated capabilities within the main OpenStack project, as well as third-party efforts.
“Security requirements vary dramatically between different environments,” Bryce said. “The responsibility of the upstream community is to build something that is broadly useful that has the ability to be customized and used for different use cases.”
Watch the full video below:
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.