The successor to the Pike release of the OpenStack open source cloud computing platform, OpenStack Queens made its debut on February 28, 2018, as the seventeenth major release of OpenStack. Queens arrives as the first update in 2018 for OpenStack, and its successor, OpenStack Rocky, is expected to follow later in the year.
As with previous OpenStack releases, Queens takes its name from a nearby city or distinguishing feature relative to the OpenStack design summit corresponding to each OpenStack release. In this case, OpenStack Queens gets its name from the Queens Pound River as well as the Queens Park suburb and park in New South Wales, Australia. New South Wales hosted the OpenStack Summit in Sydney from November 6th through November 8th in 2017.
Feature Enhancements and New Projects in OpenStack Queens
While the OpenStack Pike release focused largely on stabilizing and optimizing existing projects and interoperability, OpenStack Queens delivers a variety of new capabilities and features, as well as new projects.
OpenStack Queens adds virtual GPU (vGPU) support and improved container integration through the new OpenStack Zun container service project and the OpenStack Helm Project, which serves as a package manager for the Kubernetes container orchestration system. OpenStack Queens also debuts the new Cyborg project (previously known as Nomad), which provides a framework for managing hardware and software acceleration resources.
Queens additionally provides Cinder Multi-Attach support for attaching the same Cinder volume to multiple virtual machines (VMs). Finally, OpenStack Queens also introduces support for the Lightweight Open Container Initiative (LOCI) project, which provides an alternative to the OpenStack Kola project for handling container runtimes.
ServerWatch has a more in-depth article on some of the key new projects and features in OpenStack Queens here
