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Technology

What an amazing month! After several weeks of really hard work, in early April we released the stable version of our new OpenNebula 6.0 “Mutara! 🚀 Thanks to our ONEedge initiative, this new release comes with powerful edge computing features for deploying your VMs, application containers, and Kubernetes clusters wherever you need them! Now you can use OpenNebula to build true hybrid and multi-cloud environments to avoid vendor lock-in (and headaches) thanks to the abstraction layer it provides on top of public cloud and edge providers such as AWS and Equinix Metal—with many more integrations to come in the near future! ⚡ If you missed our presentation webinar, now you can watch it on demand. Enjoy!

So, what about the rest of the month? Well, our brave Engineering Team has not been resting on their laurels! They’ve also released EE Maintenance Release 5.12.9 (as we announced last year, EE 5.12 is an LTS version with an expected EOL of September 15, 2022) and CE Patch Release 5.12, which comes with the open source migration packages that users with commercial deployments based on OpenNebula CE will need if they decide to upgrade their old versions to CE 5.12. But that’s not all! A few days ago we released EE Maintenance Release 6.0.1 and CE Patch Release 6.0.0.1, which incorporate a number of backported new features and several fixed issues. And stay tuned because there are more new features on the way! 🤓

Community

As we announced last month, OpenNebula will be sponsoring the Kubernetes on Edge Day (May 4) along with our friends from Red Hat, Rancher, and Intel. This is an exciting event organized by the CNCF that comes at a time when, as you know, we are looking at ways in which we can expand our support for Kubernetes 🤹 This month, for instance, we released a new version of our Kubernetes Virtual Appliance that includes the bare-metal load balancer MetalLB, a feature that some of our users had recently demanded from us. We hear you! 📡

We also mentioned last month that our colleagues from Oracle, in collaboration with Rice University, had been working on a new open source cloud-bursting driver for OpenNebula 5.12 to be able to interact with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure ☁️ Well, now it’s available to download from our Add-ons Catalog, and the Oracle development team is inviting the OpenNebula Community to try it out (there are OCI Free Tier options available, btw) and send them your feedback! ➡️ Read the full announcement by Alison Derbenwick, Vice President, Oracle for Research.

And if you want to read more about how other Higher Education institutions are using OpenNebula, don’t miss this recent Case Study based on the deployment at Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium): “From a decision-making standpoint, the overall simplicity offered by OpenNebula as a complete solution was hard to ignore. It has made it easy to build and manage a robust solution at UCLouvain that serves our long-term needs. We run almost everything on it“, said Laurent Grawet, IT Systems Engineer, UCLouvain 🤩

Outreach

It’s also been an amazing month in terms of events and activities! But first of all, big thanks to Layer123 for selecting us as the Best Edge Computing Solution at their Europe 2021 event. It means a lot to us! 🎉 It was great to be able to present our new edge computing solution to a keen audience and to receive such good feedback from Telcos, 5G providers, and other companies starting to operate at the edge. We are here to help you conquer the edge with our open source technology! 🌎

And that award comes a few weeks after participants at the EIC Investor Day on Digitalization of the European Industry selected us as the most exciting technology in the IoT and Cloud category, and we were invited by the European Commission to join the “Visionary Concepts” session at their Next-Gen IoT and Edge Computing Strategy Forum. Our disruptive approach to edge computing is getting a lot of traction! 🤓

And if you want to know more about our concept of Datacenter-Edge Continuum, here you have an amazing blog post by my colleague Alfonso Carrillo Aspiazu, Senior Edge Solutions Architect, who in mid-April joined our friends from Equinix and Nokia in a panel on the future of edge computing that took place at DCD>Building the Edge 2021 👏

Another magnificent event taking place in April was the LINBIT OpenNebula TechDays, in which we explored together over a couple of days the many benefits of combining LINBIT’s software-defined storage solution with the new OpenNebula 6.0! The recordings of the sessions are already available on their website, so check it out!

And speaking of events, a few days ago we announced that the 9th edition of our OpenNebulaConf (the one we had to cancel last year because of… well, you know… 😷) has been rescheduled and will finally be taking place on March 24-25, 2022, in Brussels (Belgium). Make sure you write that down on your calendars—we have a lot to catch up on after all this time! 🗓️

PS: Take care of yourselves and of those around you. All our support to those who are fighting the pandemic on the front lines! 💪