It’s been an amazing year in cloud computing in general and in OpenNebula in particular. We are excited to keep the momentum going. The number of downloads, users, and contributors has continued doubling each year and we have been able to offer more than we ever thought possible. Moreover, 2013 was a landmark year for our project with the celebration of the first ever OpenNebula conference.

With 2013 coming quickly to a close, we’d like to review what this year has meant for the OpenNebula project and give you a peek at what you can expect from us in 2014. You have all the details about the great progress that we have seen for the OpenNebula project in our monthly newsletters.

Technology

During 2013, we have worked very hard to continue delivering the most solid, powerful and flexible open-source management platform to build and manage Enterprise Clouds. We have continued focusing on solving real user needs in innovative ways with the involvement of the users in a really vendor-agnostic project. Our project has released 3 updates of the software: 4.0 Eagle, 4.2 Flame and 4.4 Retina, and 5 maintenance releases within a rapid release cycle aimed at accelerating the transfer of innovation to the market. The roadmap of these releases was completely driven by users needs with features that meet real demands, and not features that resulted from an agreement between IT vendors planning to create their own proprietary cloud solution.

A significant number of cool new features were included in OpenNebula: a highly-scalable monitoring system, an enhanced EC2/EBS implementation, an extended cloud bursting functionality, storage load balancing, multiple group support, multiple system datastore support, high availability, a revamped Sunstone with a new cloud view, multi-VM application management with auto-scaling, a whole new set of operations for VMs like system and disk snapshoting and dynamic capacity re-sizing, programmable VM actions, IPv6… There are some new drivers also, like Ceph, as well as many improvements for VMware, KVM and Xen.

After the Christmas break, we will organize a IRC meeting to discuss the requests for new features and for extending existing features. This valuable input will be used to create the short-term roadmap for OpenNebula 4.6 (due in March 2014).

The mechanisms offered to try out OpenNebula have been extended. Besides the existing Sandboxes with OpenNebula preinstalled (for VirtualBox, KVM, VMware ESX and Amazon EC2), an effort was carried out to develop simple how-to guides describing the step-by-step process to deploy OpenNebula in the most common linux and hypervisor combinations. Currently there are guides for CentOS/Xen, CentOS/VMware, CentOS/KVM and Ubuntu/KVM. In order to ease the installation of OpenNebula, we have also created package repositories for CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian and openSUSE to make the installation and upgrade even easier.

Moreover, the documentation system has been changed from DokuWiki to Sphinx, and it is now backed in Github. This allows to improve readability, create better PDF guides, and improve collaboration. We know that the documentation is as important as the code, so we want the community to be involved, guaranteeing its high quality.

We  prepared two articles to briefly describe our view and experience about the different types of cloud models, how the main open-source cloud management platforms (namely Eucalyptus, CloudStack, OpenStack and OpenNebula) are targeting their needs, and the different perspectives of openness. We also had an invited post comparing the simplicity of OpenNebula with that of the Russian Soyuz. We completely agree, it is important to stay in focus to deliver a quality product. Way to go!

Community

Many people and organizations have contributed in different ways, from the expertise and dedication of our core committers and hundreds of contributors to the valuable feedback of our thousands of users. Contributors are users of the software, like CentOS, ChinaMobile, Cisco, Deutsch Post, Blackberry, Produban, FermiLab, Akamai…, who are willing to contribute new innovative features from their production environments. During 2013, we have received great contributions: Linux Containers (LXC) drivers,  Clustered Xen Manager (CXM) drivers, econe metadata server, Rex.io plugin,  Ceph drivers,  LVM shared drivers, NetApp filers driver, InfiniBand support, VirtualBox drivers, perl binding for OpenNebula’s native xmlrpc interface, OpenNebula over SSD disks, OpenNebula Puppet module…

We welcomed  new partners like NetWays, Inovex, LMD, viApps and Terradue, who are providing value-added integration and consulting services around OpenNebula. These new partnerships underpin the confidence of these companies have in OpenNebula and C12G Labs.

Besides, this year marked the creation of multiple OpenNebula User Groups in Germany, France, Italy, USA, Spain, Hungary, Cuba, Egypt…

Last, and not least, the new OpenNebula add-ons program was born as well this last november. Not being mature enough to be included in OpenNebula, these new add-ons would now have  support for their enhancement and coordinated development to avoid redundant work. This initiative has been well received by the community, we are glad you liked it, we are looking forward for your contributions.

Outreach

We are  very proud to have contributed to the European Roadmap for Cloud Technologies under H2020, and for the attention OpenNebula gets by the European Commission: “OpenNebula has played an important role in driving and supporting the transition to cloud computing and thus accelerating the pace of innovation in Europe”

During the year, members of the OpenNebula team or people deeply familiar with the technology spoke in many events: FOSDEM, CeBIT, FlossUK, Linux Open Admin Days, LinuxTag, CentOS Dojo, OSDC, Irish Free Software Organisation,  Xen Hackathon, ISC Cloud’13, Ceph Community Day, EGI Technical Forum, Cloud Interoperability Week, CentOS Dojo, Bucharest, Cloud Interoperability Guide and EGI Technical Forum, Jornadas Técnicas RedIris…

Awesome speakers render awesome talks, like the ones held at the OpenNebulaConf 2013. If you want to remember the great ambience of the conference, or if you haven’t got a chance to attend, here is your opportunity to (re)visit the knowledge shared in the conference in the form of recordings of the keynotes and talks. Also, you can check out the presentations of the speakers if you want to consult a particular detail that you do not quite remember. And, to make the experience even more immersive, scout through the conference pictures. Next year’s OpenNebula Conference will be held in Berlin as well, 2-4 of December, 2014. If you want to repeat or find out how it is for yourself, save the date!.

Last month C12G hosted the CentOS Dojo in its HQ in Madrid. It started with a OpenNebula tutorial, given the previous day, and it displayed an array of very interesting talks, covering technical aspects related to OpenNebula and CentOS. Thanks a lot to the attendees to help render such a productive event!

During 2013, a series of public training courses on OpenNebula Fundamentals, aimed to cloud administrators and operators, was given by members of the OpenNebula Team in the C12G headquarters in Madrid. The courses covered the process of installing, configuring and operating private and hybrid clouds using OpenNebula. Additionally the programs briefly addressed the integration of OpenNebula with other components in the data center. If you are interested in future public training courses, please check the C12G training web page.

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Looking back, it is inspiring the distance that we have come together since our first release of OpenNebula six years ago. And that is nothing compared to what is planned for the future. We are looking forward to another year of great running memories.

Reached this point, we want to give a huge THANKS! to our community. No, seriously guys, you rock big time. OpenNebula wouldn’t be nearly as good as it is today without all of you.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to wish you health, happiness and prosperity in 2014 to you and your loved ones!.

On behalf of the OpenNebula Project.