OpenStack Kilo and a Robust Private Cloud
Author: Avishay Traeger, Phd. Software Engineer at Stratoscale
At the end of last year, I wrote an article about the promising stability of the upcoming Kilo release. Last month, Kilo released a big advancement in terms of stability: continuous integration (CI) for Cinder to test storage drivers; Nova, whose CI runs tests on its internally supported hypervisors; and Neutron, whose CI runs internal tests on Neutron plugins. These are the major projects that have plugins and require automated tests as well as functionality tests to integrate third party drivers.
Before the third party CI effort got under way, each individual hardware vendor was responsible for testing drivers beforehand. Some vendors were more skilled at this than others, but still, launching the CI process revealed many bugs within the system, reflecting vendor errors that should have been resolved ahead of time.
The stabilization efforts for Cinder backend drivers began with the Juno release and required vendors to manually submit test results for their Cinder drivers. In the “old way”, OpenStack deployers would have to cross their fingers and hope that the drivers were reliable, well written and pre-tested, at which point they would try to deploy. If something didn’t work, they’d find the bug, send it to the vendor to be fixed, and eventually receive a patch. Obviously, this process affected the reliability of OpenStack as a whole.
Furthermore, when an OpenStack vendor visits a customer’s site to deploy OpenStack, the customer may very well use hardware that is unfamiliar to the deployer. The result? Lots more debugging. The Kilo release represents the first instance in which consistency is ensured across more than 100 third party driver options.
Join Us to Learn More
While enterprises like Walmart and Paypal took the strategic route and built massive OpenStack clouds, it’s clear that OpenStack is the defacto standard of private clouds. However with the many new and important Kilo features, aspects such as high availability and scalability are not quite smoothed out yet.
I welcome you to join us at the OpenStack IL event to hear what we have to say about the benefits of OpenStack’s high level architecture. In addition to detailing its robustness and reliability, we’ll also cover possible solutions to ease deployment and distribution.
