OpenEBS v0.5 Released

     (Photo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/613266/OpenEBS.jpg )

OpenEBS has generated the most community interest of container-native storage projects used for stateful structured data workloads during 2017 as measured by GitHub stars, issues, PRs, and contributors. Today's release of OpenEBS 0.5 is the most significant to date for OpenEBS, both for features now available (release notes) and for those capabilities that are to be made available shortly.

OpenEBS 0.5 is increasingly mature: 

OpenEBS is unusual in a variety of ways including:

• Every DevOps team can have their own storage system. This means they do not have to wait on central IT to move ahead - and so can innovate faster.  
• OpenEBS can leverage existing central storage and combine it with direct-attached storage for hyper-converged performance and density.
• Tight integration into Kubernetes and the containerization on standard containers (not special version containers) means users need not spend any time configuring or building the storage system before deployment; this is a significant difference versus other containerized storage systems as most of these systems require the use of special OS builds on the hosts, requiring reinstallation of the entire container environment to be adopted.  

About the v0.5 release, Kiran Mova, VP engineering of OpenEBS said, "We are seeing a clear resonance of the value proposition that OpenEBS brings to the DevOps teams dealing with systems with large number of micro-services, who are independently evaluating the technology and finding ways to automate their Compute, Network, Storage and Data related Operations."

New features for OpenEBS released as a part of 0.5 include:

• Pluggable storage engine - and a technology preview of a higher performance storage engine, named cStor, written in C and leveraging aspects of OpenZFS
• Improved integration with Prometheus and Grafana and publishing best practices and configuration files to simplify and extend monitoring of OpenEBS via an approach that is simple to apply to other monitoring solutions
• Support for extended attribute storage policies, such as automatic capacity growth and management policies, replica counts, storage locations and more

Additionally, CloudByte contributed improvements to the Kubernetes console that enable improved management of storage provided by OpenEBS and other storage systems.  

The cStor technology preview is the first containerized storage controller to leverage pieces of OpenZFS in the user space for advanced capabilities such as:

• Incremental, copy-on-write based snapshotting. This functionality helps with dev to testing, staging and production pipelines and also cross-cloud data mobility.
• Data integrity checks to ensure silent data corruption is identified and, typically, self-corrected.

cStor will be open sourced in 2018 as it further matures.  

In addition to over 300 accepted PRs and 50 new external contributors that joined since OpenEBS 0.4, the broader OpenEBS community has contributed a number of new guides to how to run stateful workloads on Kubernetes that are proving to be quite popular.  

Many of these guides are now integrated into the improved OpenEBS documentation at:

http://openebs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Usecases/cassandra.html

Stateful workloads covered by these guides include MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis, CockroachDB, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, Jenkins, and others.  

OpenEBS 0.5 is being demonstrated and discussed on December 5-8th at the upcoming OpenShift Commons Gathering and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Austin, Texas. The OpenEBS team is going to be at the OpenEBS booths at both of these events and looks forward to catching up with users and community members in person.  

About OpenEBS (http://www.openebs.io)

OpenEBS (@openebs) addresses the challenge of large scale storage management faced by many container users as they move mission critical, stateful workloads onto containers running in a multi-cloud and hybrid environment. OpenEBS works seamlessly with Kubernetes and containerized the storage controller itself. OpenEBS is available under the Apache 2 license and is primarily sponsored by CloudByte, Inc.

OpenEBS Media Contact:
Niti Suryawanshi
niti.suryawanshi@openebs.io
4300 Stevens Creek Boulevard
Suite 270
San Jose, CA 95129