From the ‘Grizzled to Svelt’ files:
PORTLAND. Vish Ishaya has been the project leader of the open source OpenStack Nova Compute project since the beginning of OpenStack. He’s now stepping aside and Red Hat developer Russell Bryant is now taking the help of the core compute project that makes OpenStack, OpenStack.
At the OpenStack Summit here in Portland the two men talked about the past, present and future of Nova.
For the Grizzly release, Ishaya said that over 700 bugs were fixed and over 60 featreus were added. Among the really interesting highlights (that I didn’t realize before the talk) was the ability to do full live snapshotting of running instances as well as the abiilty to hotplug network adapter.
Havana
For the Havana release, incoming Nova Compute Project Leader Russell Bryant said that the big themes would be live upgrades as well as improved security, scale, performance and reliability.
Bryant went through a laundry list of awesome new features that are currently under discussion. From my perspective the proposed scheduling improvements are neat. In Havana, the ability to schedule compute based on CPU utilization as well as the ability to reserve a host could be included. There is also a group scheduling capability that might land.
“People want to have a group of instances and then be able to add policy around that,” Bryant said. “For example, I don’t want any of a group of vm’s to run on the same host for availability reasons.”
Another proposed feature is the ability to ‘mothball’ a server. Bryant explained that mothballing would be for cases where the administrator doesn’t want to delete an instance but they don’t want to be running it either for resource reasons.
That’s just the tip of the spear for a long list of what might land in the next major release of OpenStack Compute. We’ll see how it shapes up over the next six months.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
