10.26.2015
Akanda, the major contributor and supporter of the recently launched OpenStack Project Astara, today announced Astara’s Liberty release at OpenStack Summit Tokyo. The new version now available to OpenStack operators is the open source network orchestration platform’s most substantial since its initial launch, and is Astara’s first since becoming an official OpenStack project.
Astara’s Liberty release gives OpenStack operators a vendor-agnostic network orchestration platform for layer 3 through 7 network services that radically simplifies the complexity and scale of Neutron implementations. The production-proven OpenStack project fully negates the need for multiple plugins and SDN controllers. By orchestrating network functions from different providers on bare metal, VMs, and containers, Astara provides unprecedented flexibility, agility, and stability to OpenStack cloud developers and service providers.
What’s new in Astara’s Liberty release?
- More configurability: A new load balancer driver allows OpenStack operators to configure the platform to load and manage only the resources they choose. Current implementations include NGINX and NGINX Plus.
- Quicker provisioning: Neutron resources are now much more quickly provisioned onto appliance VMs via a new service that manages pools of hot-standby appliance VMs.
- Cumulus Networks integration: Tight integration and support for Dynamic Lightweight Network Virtualization gives OpenStack operators a complete, OpenStack-ready stack.
- Higher availability: Active-active high availability and scaling improvements.
- Full compatibility with Liberty: Astara is synced to Liberty’s global requirements, ensuring smooth installation into system namespaces shared by other OpenStack projects.
- Full compatibility with Kilo and Juno: For clouds running OpenStack Kilo or Juno, the new Astara release can be completely backported.
“Astara’s first release as an official OpenStack project is an exciting one for OpenStack operators,” said Henrik Rosendahl, CEO, Akanda. “The goal of Astara is to make Networking and DevOps’ lives easier. With tremendous community support and momentum for the platform throughout its first year, Astara is the answer for massively simplified OpenStack networking stack that can replace traditional – and expensive – single vendor lock-in.”
“As an operator of OpenStack, it’s fantastic to see new open source projects like Astara extend and simplify the platform,” said Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost and OpenStack Foundation board member. “The Liberty release of OpenStack demonstrates the power of the big tent approach to offering choice and operating efficiency for delivering a 100% open source cloud to end users and customers.”
akanda.io
