By Mauri Whalen, Vice President in the Software and Services Group and Director of Core System Software in the Open Source Technology Center at Intel
The message at Intel’s recent Cloud Day event was clear: we’re serious about making cloud deployments easier and faster through new products, programs, and collaborations. OpenStack is critical to our cloud strategy, and we’re excited about the OpenStack Mitaka release. I want to share some of the work Intel is driving in the OpenStack community and through contributions to Mitaka.
The OpenStack Innovation Center (OSIC), our collaboration with Rackspace, continues to show strong momentum. The joint Intel/ Rackspace engineering team working at OSIC has submitted 174 patches and reviewed almost 1,000 more. Additionally, the OSIC environment itself is uniquely equipped to allow community testing of the upstream code base at true enterprise scale. After opening the first of two 1,000-node clusters to the community in October, we’ve seen great response with reservations for bare-metal allocations already at full capacity. Buildout of the second cluster is nearing completion.
Turning our attention to Mitaka, I look forward to what this release is delivering. Intel has been very active in Mitaka, contributing tens of thousands of lines of code targeting high availability for tenants and services, network and storage support, and ease of deployment among other areas. Our team also focused on improving the upgrade process, enabling the upgrade of many core OpenStack components without downtime, and have made significant improvements to live migration. These enhancements help enterprises deliver stable services, supporting long-running enterprise workloads capable of withstanding maintenance to the underlying infrastructure.
We believe containers are critical to cloud computing, and we continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible with this technology through our Clear Linux for Intel Architecture project. From Intel Clear Container support in Magnum to compiler techniques enabling architecture-specific optimizations at runtime and leveraging the security features of Intel® Architecture, Intel is committed to improving performance and security of containers in the cloud.
Finally, building on two successful hackathons Intel conducted with Huawei last year in China to address OpenStack bugs, Intel upped the ante this year, joining with six more corporate sponsors in bringing the worldwide community together for a Global OpenStack Bug Smash March 7-9 that included new and experienced developers, mentors, and official code reviewers. The results are impressive: in 12 cities across 9 countries, 302 contributors authored patches to smash 293 bugs. Thanks to everyone who participated in the first global bug smash. We look forward to many more!
These efforts underscore Intel’s commitment to accelerating OpenStack adoption. I look forward to continuing the discussion at OpenStack Summit Austin this week. Be sure to join Intel in Austin to hear more about how we’re improving the OpenStack experience for operators, community members and developers alike.