The successor to the Ocata release of the OpenStack open source cloud computing platform, OpenStack Pike arrived on August 30, 2017 as the sixteenth major release of OpenStack.
Pike is the second update in 2017 for OpenStack, following OpenStack Ocata s debut in February. Pike s successor, OpenStack Queens, supplanted OpenStack Pike in late February 2018. And the follow-up to Queens, OpenStack Rocky, is expected to be released not too long after that.
As with previous OpenStack releases, Pike 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 Pike is short for the Massachusetts Turnpike, a major highway running through the state of Massachusetts that connects the high-tech industry in Boston with the state s workforce.
Feature Enhancements in OpenStack Pike
Like OpenStack Ocata, OpenStack Pike serves primarily as a stabilization release for the OpenStack platform, focusing on improved manageability with a particular emphasis on enabling standalone OpenStack services without the need for an entire set of OpenStack projects. Pike makes it possible to run both the Ironic bare-metal service and the Cinder block storage project in a more standalone, composable approach.
Additional new features in OpenStack Pike include a new native container management service called Zun, improved OpenStack Kolla lifecycle management tools, and “production-ready” support for Cells version 2 in Nova.
OpenStack Pike has also been re-based to support the newer Python 3.5 release, as opposed to having relied on the Python 2 programming language in previous releases.
