OpenStack Touts Easier Deployments With Pike Release

The OpenStack community has released ‘Pike’, the sixteenth edition of its popular open source infrastructure software.

Pike promises to deliver better manageability, scalability and modularity to the platform, which now powers more than a thousand private clouds running across more than five million physical cores.

OpenStack Pike

OpenStack of course is an open source and free cloud computing software service. It is usually deployed as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution, and comes with a set of tools to help users construct and manage cloud platforms for both public and private clouds.

It can be utilised to deploy virtual machines and the source code can be tweaked to suit individual uses and requirements.

Openstack Pike brings with it an emphasis on catering to ‘composable services’ in order to help customers with new usage requirements from containers, machine learning and edge computing for example.

OpenStack Ironic bare metal service also now features enhanced integration for Cinder block storage and Neutron networking. And lifecycle management tools such as OpenStack Kolla have been updated to make it easier to manage and upgrade OpenStack using services such as Kubernetes and Ansible.

“The features and upgrades that Pike brings are the lessons of experience you get from enabling thousands of public and private clouds, large and small, for seven-plus years,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation.

“The rise of composable services and simpler consumption options are part of that maturation process. Our community is now focused on eliminating future technical debt as well as growing OpenStack¹s capabilities to support ever-expanding use cases.”

Other Improvements

Other new developments with Pike is the release of version 2 of Nova Cells to help with large deployments and scaling the compute service.

Support has been added for Python 3.5 in order to be ready for when Python 2.x reaches the end of its life in 2020.

Leveraging is being increasingly being used as the distributed lock management solution for OpenStack, and integrations are starting to appear in the Pike release.

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