May 2020 OpenNebula Newsletter contains the highlights of the OpenNebula project and its Community throughout the month.

Technology

With large cloud providers taking increasingly flamboyant measures to try to convince corporate users to migrate to their public clouds, we at OpenNebula know that what really brings freedom to an organization’s cloud infrastructure—and avoids vendor lock-in—is the combination of three simple ideas: open source software, an elastic private cloud, and the capacity to incorporate additional resources from bare-metal providers when necessary. This is our recipe for the enterprise cloud, fashions aside.

And that’s why we keep focusing our efforts on innovation, trying to adapt OpenNebula to the real needs of our users and customers… to boldly go where no cloud has gone before! 🚀 And this is exactly what the new OpenNebula 5.12—codenamed after the spectacular Firework Nebula—does. This month we have released its beta version, which comes with a preview of some of the major new features that “Firework” will bring along: full support for AWS Firecracker micro-VMs and seamless integration with the Docker Hub marketplace!

In the meantime, while the stable version of OpenNebula 5.12 gets ready for launch, we keep improving OpenNebula 5.10 “Boomerang”. Earlier this month our Engineering Team announced Hotfix Release 5.10.5. While OpenNebula is fully open source, packages from hotfix incremental versions are not publicly released, and are only available for users with an active OpenNebula Subscription. As usual, this version fixes several issues and includes a number of new features that have been backported.

Community

With the imminent release of OpenNebula 5.12 “Firework” also comes the traditional re-evaluation of the priorities for the rest of the year. To make sure all of our current users had a chance to have their say and help us define OpenNebula’s roadmap for 2020, this month we’ve launched our annual Architecture Survey. As usual, in the following weeks we’ll be publishing the results of this large-scale consultation.

And this month we have also been working on our new collection of screencasts. As promised, we’ll be producing new stuff regularly, so keep an eye on our social networks and website! In May we have published three new screencasts: a first one on how to build an image for Windows Virtual Machines, followed by a second one on how to use OpenNebula + Apache Guacamole to set up an open source VDI solution, and finally a third one on how to use miniONE to deploy VMs on the Edge. Not bad, right? 😉

Outreach

In April we announced that we were working on a new webinar series, and here it is, with the first of our OpenNebula Webinars now available on demand: the new integration of AWS Firecracker. Special thanks to this month’s guest speakers: Andreea Florescu (Software Developer Engineer at AWS).

This month we’ve also have been participating at some third-party events, including the Cloud Data Summit (North America). Take a look at the presentation on Edge Computing delivered by our colleague Michael Abdou, and see the several use cases where OpenNebula’s Elastic Private Cloud is put to work, including IoT and Kubernetes.

And speaking of events… please be advised that our OpenNebula Conference 2020, that was going to take place in Brussels (Belgium) later this year, has been re-scheduled for late April 2021 due to the current COVID-19 crisis.

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