OpenStack, the cloud that is aiming to become the standard for private deployments has released the next version of its software.

Newton is now the 14th version of the open source software for building OpenStack clouds and it features several enhancements.

The OpenStack community has added in capabilities to improve scalability, resilience, and user experiences with improvements being made to the bare metal provisioning service Ironic, the orchestration cluster manager Magnum, and Kruryr container networking project to more seamlessly integrate containers under one control plane.

On the scalability front Newton has been designed to reduce architectural and functional barrier to scalability, the company said. In order to do this the ability to scale up or down across platforms and geographies has been added.

The community has improved the scale up/scale down capabilities in Nova, Horizon, and Swift.

Resilience is said to be improved thanks to Cinder, Ironic, Neutron, and Trove, while security improvements have been included with Keystone so that it offers upgrades that include PCI compliance and encrypted credentials.

Cinder will add support for retyping encrypted to unencrypted volumes and vice versa, while it now also includes micro-version support, the ability to delete volumes with snapshots using a cascading feature, and a backup service that is designed to be scaled to multiple instances.

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation.
Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation.

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation said: “The new features and enhancements in Newton underscore the power of OpenStack: it handles more workloads in more ways across more industries worldwide. OpenStack is a cloud platform that ties everything together—compute, network, storage, and innovative cloud technologies.”

The final area of improvement is said to be with the user experience. The open source cloud said that the advances in Newton help to advance OpenStack as the one cloud platform for virtualisation, bare metal, and containers.

On this front users will be able to see that Magnum offers provisioning for container orchestration tools’ Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesos.

The Kuryr element adds Neutron networking capabilities to containers in order to make Swarm and Kubernetes integration available.

Another function of Kuryr is to nest virtual machines through integration with Magnum and Neutron.

Newton was designed and built by 2,581 developers, operators, and users from 309 organisations. The roll out of products and services will come in the next few weeks and months.