News

Today the OpenStack 2014.1.3 stable Icehouse release has been announced. We’re currently testing and developing on version 2014.1.2 and will upgrade as soon as we’ve determined the changes and possible impact to our environments. Our production installation has remained stable for the last couple of weeks in which even a hardware disruption didn’t result in any impact to services. We’ve made a lot of progress with our automation tool for rolling out OTA environments and made structural changes to the use and handling of API’s.

Last week, several configurations have been created in Razor and Puppet to roll out different development environments with specific settings. These environments are using virtual Arista switches in order to resemble eventual production as closely as possible. Among other things, during the OpenStack meetup in Amsterdam on Wednesday 3 September, we’ve been given tips on how to improve performance of the erasure coded Ceph storage, which we’re intending to try out and possibly use.

Several users have continued last week’s trying out of our SSD-equipped test environments. In addition, more progress has been made towards the look and feel and future construction of the website and online community. Amongst other things, design sketches and icons have been made for users and components.

This week, focus for testing shifted mostly towards failover and recovery mechanisms and live migration of instances. Calamari, the reporting and management platform for Ceph, is producing the first graphs on usage and availability as well. Our colleagues are receiving fully virtualized test instances of the platform for them to use for providing feedback on stability, ease of use and performance. Other environments have been created for developing and testing of the APIs for the different teams within the project.

We’re continuing performance testing and benchmarking the pre-production platform, which has also been opened for individual (internal) beta test accounts. More work has been done on debugging some open issues regarding the Neutron networking component. The public API has been tested for automatic starting of images and instances. More preliminary sketches have been made of the logo.

Work is ongoing for testing performance and streamlining the installation of the platform using Puppet. We’re testing the erasure coded Ceph storage pools and different OS images (Ubuntu, CentOS, CoreOS and Windows 2012 for now). First work has been done on the final branding and a logo of our service and the user community.