Latest OpenStack release - Mitaka

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The 13th release for OpenStack, called Mitaka was released on May7th  .  The LTC has been active in OpenStack since the Folsum (6th) release.   In Mitaka. our LTC team validated a good portion of the release on Power,  testing every developer patch that came in for key OpenStack project, the most critical being the Nova Compute node.   The team also made significant contributions in Ironic (Bare Metal), Neutron (Networking) and Nova (Compute) in this release.

• Continuous Integration on Power :  During the Mitaka release cycle, OpenStack KVM on Power CI ran the integration test suite (Tempest) on devstack-gate jobs against every patchset and reported to the Gerrit review system for Nova and Devstack projects. It also validated in periodic internal jobs the following projects: Keystone, Glance, Cinder, Swift, Requirements, Tempest, Neutron and devstack-gate.  The full Tempest suite currently runs 1127 test cases and during the Mitaka release the KVM on Power CI team reduced the number of skipped tests by increasing the test coverage  to 1124 tests (99.7%). The team focused on the internal infrastructure improvements by working on the cloud upgrade preparation to support Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 LTS release with OpenStack Mitaka. Neutron job on devstack-gate has been added in this cycle as one of the core projects from the big tent to expand the test coverage for Power in OpenStack.  (For more detail, see this DeveloperWorks blog https://developer.ibm.com/opentech/2016/04/21/kvm-on-power-ci-increasing-the-test-coverage/)
• Ironic : During the Mitaka summit, the decision was made to start enforcing third party CI testing for all drivers. We continue to be strong leaders in the community in this area and shared our experience with the project in the formation of requirements for Ironic. We drafted and saw the blueprint and spec through to acceptance. Internally, development was completed to enable full baremetal CI testing for Power, a first for any platform. This also resulted in several enhancements to the newly forming Ironic QA area, where we also co-chair the sub-team meetings. ( For more detail see this DeveloperWorks blog https://developer.ibm.com/opentech/2016/04/20/ironic-continuous-integration-testing-with-hardware-pool-management/ )
• Neutron : The focus in Mitaka was to accomplish the integration between Neutron, Designate (OpenStack's DNS as a Service) and Nova. With this integration, users are now able to associate a DNS label to their VM's, ports and floating IP's and publish those name to the to the DNS as a Service.  This work also required corresponding changes to Nova, the instance boot process was updated to use the Neutron - DNS integration to publish intance's ports names in the external DNS service.   Along with the code submissions a good amount of effort went into improving documenting DNS integration into OpenStack networking.   We are now a co-chair f the L3 Nuetron sub-team, coordinating the teams work to resolve defects in the backlog.
• Nova : The focus was on making things better for operators/deployers of OpenStack, and this was reflected in a lot of what the Nova community focused on. The configuration option cleanup effort, which involved centralizing the location of these options (they were formerly scattered throughout the code base), and then expanding the help text for each from a terse phrase that usually only had meaning to the coder who added that option to a much more verbose format that explained what the option affected, and what other options could interact with this one. The other main thing along these lines was the Nova API team, which dedicated the entire cycle to improving the documentation around the API. Before this, in order to understand what an API call did, you had to dig into the code itself. Now you can read the docs to understand the calls, making life easier for those building apps with OpenStack. ( for more information see this DeveloperWorks block https://developer.ibm.com/opentech/2016/04/22/enhancing-usability-in-openstack-mitaka/ )

For a broader view of IBM's contributions to Mitaka, here is a link to a good summary https://developer.ibm.com/opentech/2016/04/07/a-guide-to-the-openstack-mitaka-release/.