As we quickly finish the last hours of 2017, we want to recap on what it meant for OpenNebula and summarize the huge achievements and milestones that the project had throughout the year.

OpenNebula turned 10 years old in 2017. We believe this is an astounding accomplishment by an infrastructure open source project that has achieved a high degree of matureness, and we would like to thank the OpenNebula community for their support. It wouldn’t be possible to achieve the adoption that OpenNebula has without your interest and engagement. We’d like to thank specially the project contributors for the efforts in bringing excellence to the cloud management platform field.

Some great improvements have been introduced this year in OpenNebula. Blackberry’s request for VM Groups was a great challenge but finally we could add this new feature in OpenNebula 5.4. Also the University of Louvain has funded new enhancements such as the Non-SLAAC IPv6 Address Range and the configurable image persistence setting. We would like to thank these sponsors, as we understand it they are helping not only the OpenNebula project but also the open source community.

OpenNebula adoption keeps striving at a healthy pace. We are proud to count very large scale infrastructures spanning across datacenters and based on heterogeneous virtualization, storage and networking platforms. We are happy to continue the same download rate as last year of OpenNebula packages served by our repositories, not counting the OpenNebula packages included in the most popular Linux distros.

Two important releases were deployed this year, OpenNebula 5.4 and vOneCloud 3.0, introducing significant features.

OpenNebula 5.4 (Medusa) arrived in June with a great acceptance among our users. Since then, 5 incremental releases were deployed to fix and improve this new software version. One of the major improvements is the native implementation of RAFT consensus algorithm which enables the High Availability deployment of the OpenNebula front-end without relying on third party components. VM groups were born this year, now any user will be able to group virtual machines depending on their role, activity, resources… Thanks to the feedback from our community, we know that this new feature is being really helpful for many of you. Cheers for that! You can follow the changelog on our documentation page to check this release or any previous one.

The OpenNebula team managed to implement full storage and network management capabilities on vOneCloud 3.0. Of course we did many more things that you can check on the release notes. Meanwhile, documentation has been updated to match this last vOneCloud release.

The OpenNebula community are most active than ever. 2017 was the year of amazing contributions to the OpenNebula ecosystem, ranging from support to LXD containers to many other contributions like addons, functionality patches, feedback for future releases, messages in the forum, twitter and so on. If interested in learning more about these contributions, along with other details about the great progress that we have seen for the OpenNebula project, check our monthly newsletters.

This year the first OpenNebulaConf in the US was held in Boston where important institutions such as Harvard, Akamai and Telefonica showed the multiple advantages of using OpenNebula. If you missed it or just wish to review the talks and courses given, check the web page of the conference. One more year the OpenNebulaConf in Europe was a success with people attending from everywhere around the world. This meeting was held in Madrid and was a two day long event where the people from Runtastic, Blackberry, Trivago and many other companies spoke about how they use OpenNebula and why. If you are interested on what they said you can find slides, pictures, videos and many other content in the conference’s website

In addition OpenNebula experts were present at the TechDays organised all around the globe. These events aim to teach and show the advantages of using OpenNebula. Of course this would not have been possible without our beloved hosts that prepared a warm and nice environment for our TechDays talks: Bit in Netherlands, Best Buy in Canada, FlyTech and CSUC in Spain, StorPool in Bulgaria, Telefonica in Spain, CESNET in Czech Republic….

Finally, same as in 2016, we want to highlight the participation in both VMworld editions, Europe and US, where the team were showcasing vOneCloud functionality over vCenter, with massive improvements like full networking and storage support. We are planning to come back in 2018 with even more advanced functionality, so stay tuned!

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The OpenNebula team wishes happiness and prosperity in 2018 to you and your loved ones!

— The OpenNebula Team