OpenStack Newton gets official with unified cloud experience

The OpenStack Foundation has launched OpenStack Newton as an upgraded open source cloud-building solution. This new release is targeted at offering a unified cloud experience with virtualisation, bare metal and container support.

OpenStack Newton enhances the existing bare metal provisioning service, and includes the Magnum container orchestration cluster manager and the Kuryr container networking project. These inputs enable the software to handle organisations with heterogeneous environments.

“The new features and enhancements in Newton underscore the power of OpenStack. It handles more workloads in more ways across more industries, worldwide,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, in a statement.

OpenStack Newton includes enhancements such as improved scale-up/scaledown capabilities in Nova, Horizon and Swift. The platform can scale up or down across platforms and geographies.

As Bryce stated, the Newton version provides an enhanced resilience to empower worldwide organisations with the cloud. There are projects like Cinder, Neutron, Trove and Ironic to provide high availability functionality. Likewise, the OpenStack Foundation has brought out some notable security improvements and enhancements to support various deployments.

Magnum, which comes as an API service to offer deployment and management options to container orchestration tools like Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and Mesos, has also included features like the operator-centric Install Guide, support for pluggable drivers and Kubernetes clusters on bare metal servers.

Originally launched in 2010, OpenStack is backed by more than 200 vendors so far. This growth gave a reason to the non-profit organisation to design its latest version with the help of over 2,500 experts from around 300 organisations.

Existing users can test the same variant through OpenStack-powered distributions in the near future. Meanwhile, the OpenStack Foundation is set to upgrade its products and services with Newton’s features.