OpenStack Mitaka Release Aims For Ease Of Use

The OpenStack Foundation has released its next version of its OpenStack cloud platform, called Mitaka.

Mitaka, possibly named after a Japanese city which is home to a Studio Ghibli museum, is the thirteenth OpenStack release, and focuses on manageability, scalability, and making the experience much friendlier for users.

OpenStack said its Mitaka release was designed and built by an international community of 2,336 developers, operators and users from 293 organisations – a true community build.

Easier

With Improvements over last versions, namely Kilo and Liberty, Mitaka includes numerous advancements that focus on improving day-to-day ease of use for cloud deployers and administrators.

If you want to get gritty, OpenStack said that one highlight of Mitaka is a simplified configuration for the Nova compute service that introduces additional standard defaults and reduces the number of options that must be manually selected.

Mitaka also features continued advancements for scaling OpenStack clouds.

OpenStack deployments are only getting more common, five years after the original NASA release with Rackspace.

Kamesh Pemmaraju, vice president of Mirantis (which just scored Volkswagen as a customer) told TechWeekEurope that Mitaka has made major strides in improving the overall usability of OpenStack services.

“What used to take several steps to create a network in Neutron, for example, has been reduced to a single command.  It is also a lot easier now to configure Nova or to setup Keystone,” said Pemmaraju.

OpenStack has some some high-profile success of late, winning customers like BMW, VW, SAP and Time Warner. But the open source cloud platform is still seen by many as being an overly-complicated alternative to public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services.

The Foundation hopes incremental steps, like those in the Mitaka release, to ease the use of learning and operating an OpenStack cloud will bring in more customers that are looking to save money on their cloud deployments.

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