We are ready for Mitaka!

As we are eagerly waiting for OpenStack Mitaka release our developers from SUSE have some exciting news! Every six months, there is an OpenStack release, this time it’s Mitaka as the entire OpenStack community prepares for Newton (next release), the rest of the developers are wrapping up for Mitaka. So are we at SUSE! Our developers from the SUSE OpenStack Cloud team have updated and modified install-guides for openSUSE Leap and SLE12 SP1, now you can deploy Mitaka following the instructions. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s take another look at install-guides.

Install guides provides an easy way to deploy OpenStack manually. This is a great entry point for experienced Linux professionals to get started with OpenStack and also provides a way to try out different OpenStack services for existing veterans. Install guides lays out a basic architecture and provides distro-specific installation instructions for openSUSE/SLE, RHEL/CentOS and Ubuntu. You may find access to documentation for the same here (install-guides).

As the rest of the community is working hard to update install guides for Mitaka release of OpenStack, we at SUSE are proud to announce that we are ready for Mitaka. We have released obs branches and also fixed a lot of bugs arising on the way to branching this release. This has been a great experience for me on a personal level because it usually takes a couple of weeks after the release for the packages to get stable to the point where they are usable without having to churn your brains for workarounds and quick hacks. This also is great news for the OpenStack community and for SUSE OpenStack Cloud team. I know you are thinking why? Let me explain a bit …

OpenStack is a big project. This makes it incredibly difficult to integrate the entire system and test it but thanks to awesome test cases, functional tests and tools like devstack, OpenStack projects are able to maintain a high level of stability even for the current master branch! If you don’t believe me, checkout the master branch using devstack and see if for yourself! There lies many challenges which are already existing to manage and maintain all of these projects, get them in sync and make sure that they work as expected when viewed upon from the system level. Of course the history of OpenStack (from a developers point of view) has been painful for setting up and running a basic OpenStack cluster, but that’s history … and this is really great news for the OpenStack community! For the SUSE OpenStack Cloud developers, it’s another milestone apart from contributing upstream to OpenStack and making it awesome, we also have our repositories at a stable point even for the master branch! That is a difficult task. Just think of all the dependencies, different OpenStack projects and of course integrating it with the existing operating system underlying below the cloud layer … makes me really proud.

So, to wrap it up, we are proud to announce that we are ready for OpenStack Mitaka starting with install guides, are you?