The successor to the Mitaka release of the OpenStack open source cloud computing platform, OpenStack Newton made its debut on October 6th, 2016 as the fourteenth major release of OpenStack.
Newton is the second update in 2016 for OpenStack, with OpenStack Mitaka having been released in early April 2016. OpenStack Newton has been succeeded by OpenStack Ocata as of February 2017.
As with previous OpenStack releases, Newton takes its name from a nearby city or distinguishing feature relative to the OpenStack design summit corresponding to each OpenStack release. In this case, Newton is the name of a historical home in the city of Austin, Texas, where the OpenStack design summit was held in 2016.
Feature Enhancements in OpenStack Newton
With the OpenStack Newton release, OpenStack has focused on streamlining and improving the user experience while also strengthening security. Security enhancements include PCI compliance and encrypted credentials in the OpenStack Keystone component.
OpenStack Newton additionally offers updates for the Magnum container orchestration cluster management component, the Ironic bare-metal provisioning service and the Kuryr container networking project to ease the process of integrating containers. It’s also the first OpenStack release to offer a robust connection between the Kuryr container networking project and the Neutron networking project inside of OpenStack.
OpenStack components like Neutron, Cinder, Ironic and Trove have been updated as well in OpenStack Newton with enhanced high-availability (HA) functionality.
OpenStack Newton vs. OpenStack Neutron and OpenStack Nova
OpenStack Newton should not be confused with two other OpenStack individual projects that start with the letter “N.” The first of these, OpenStack Neutron, is a core component of OpenStack developed to provide “networking-as-a-service” capabilities between interface devices that can be managed by other OpenStack services such as OpenStack Nova (also known as OpenStack Compute).
OpenStack Nova itself is another component of OpenStack developed to provide on-demand access to compute resources by provisioning and managing large networks of virtual machines (VMs).
