Keeping up with OpenStack has become quite difficult lately with so much development activities going on, including the OpenStack Bexar release. Within the span of 3 months, this Bexar development cycle has targeted 42 specs and 150 active branches. February 3 will be the big day and there is variety of features that should be expected from this enhancement that specifically looks into delivering massively scalable cloud operating system.

In a blog by Thierry Carrez, he provided details on the three headers of this Bexar Project. OpenStack object storage in Swift: “The big news in Swift is support for unlimited object size, through the implementation of client-side chunking. The only size limit for your objects is now the available size in your Swift cluster! You can read more about that exciting feature in John Dickinson’s blog post. We also hope to ship Swauth, DevAuth highly scalable replacement, directly into Swift codebase. Exposure of most of the S3 API in Swift may or may not make it.”

OpenStack image registry and delivery service in Glance: “The Glance image service will expose a unified REST API (no more distinction between the image registry and the image delivery services). We will also have the possibility to upload image data and metadata over one single call. Unified client classes will be shipped directly in Glance. We also hope to have a S3 backend…”

OpenStack compute in Nova: “There is so much coming up in Nova it’s hard to summarize. Nova will make use of those new Glance client classes, obviously. We will support booting VMs from raw disk images (rather than a kernel/ramdisk/image combination) and have a rescue mode to mount your faulty disks under a sane environment. We plan to have instance snapshots ready. API servers can now expose optional admin features (through the –allow_admin_api flag), like a specific XenServer instance pause or suspend feature.”

OpenStack has been very consistent in terms of innovation, nurturing badly-needed cloud standards, getting rid of the fear of proprietary impound for cloud customers and creating an enormous ecosystem that spans cloud providers. In a recent article read on SiliconAngle, Microsoft has partnered with Cloud.com and finally the OpenStack is open for Windows Server. The collaboration was realized to introduce Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper V support to the OpenStack project. Another offspring of the OpenStack project is this Bexar cloud storage release. This undertaking was the focus in the 4-day Design Summit that was attended by over 250 participants. Two cloud platform were launched softly in that event: one is this Bexar project and the other is called Cactus.