Following the last release of OpenNebula 3.0, the OpenNebula project is moving to a rapid release development cycle. Our goal is to faster deliver new features and innovations to the community as well as better incorporate requirements of our users and feedback from the community.

With this change OpenNebula releases will react faster to fulfill the needs of IT organizations running production environments. Also we expect that delivering small functionality deltas will help to ease the transition to new releases, and to ease the maintenance of production deployments.

The OpenNebula release cycle is now structured as follows:

• OpenNebula Releases will occur every three months. Prior to the official release date there will be a beta (two weeks before) and a candidate release (a week before). These two releases are feature-freeze and are mainly devoted to bug fixing and polishing. After each release, OpenNebula publishes the blue-prints for the next release to get feedback from the community.
• The features for each release are prioritized and developed in three one-month sprints. At the end of each sprint there will be available an OpenNebula pre-release that incorporates the features and bugs solved in that sprint. The OpenNebula pre-releases go through the same testing and certification process as the official releases, i.e. you should expect the same levels of stability

The release plan for OpenNebula 3.2 is:

• OpenNebula 3.2 Final will be released on December 20th. The blue-prints for this release can be found at the development portal
• OpenNebula 3.2 will have a pre-release available by November 18th. This release incorporates the features developed during the first two sprints.

We’ll make our debut with this new process with an OpenNebula 3.2 pre-release this Friday, stay tuned for release notes and download instructions.