Astara/ReleaseNotes/Liberty

Key New Features

 * The project formely known as Akanda has been renamed to Astara. All code repositories have been/will be renamed, akanda-rug->astara-rug, akanda-appliance->astara-appliance, akanda-neutron->astara-neutron.  All code has moved from stackforge to the openstack git namespace. Additionally, the main launchpad project page is now located at http://launchpad.net/astara


 * The Rug has been migrated to using a driver framework for managing networking resources. We've moved all router-specific functionality out of the core and into a router driver.  A new loadbalancer driver has been added to allow managing of loadbalancer service VMs.  Operators are free to configure the Rug to load and manage only the resources it chooses by setting the 'enabled_drviers' flag rug.ini.


 * The appliance has been extended to allow managing of resources other than routers, beginning with support for loadbalancers. The first implementation is based on Nginx and allows Neutron loadbalancers to be orchestrated as Rug-managed Nginx loadbalancer appliances.


 * Rugs may now be clustered and horizontally scaled to provide load distribution and high availability. We've leveraged the tooz library for managing cluster memembership, allowing operators to easily cluster Rug processes using any of the supported Tooz backends.  For more information on supported tooz drivers, see http://docs.openstack.org/developer/tooz/drivers.html This feature is currently marked as experimental.


 * A new service (astara-pez-service) has been introduced to provide managing pools of hot-standby appliance VMs. This service will pre-provision and manage pools of appliance instances.  Pez dispenses these pre-provisioned instances to the main Rug processes as they are needed, allowing for much quicker provisioning of Neutron resources onto appliance VMs. This feature is currently marked as experimental.


 * A thin database layer (built on oslo.db) has been added to the Rug to manage persistance of debug state of tenants and resources across multiple Rug processes. A 'reason' argument has been added to the enable command to allow operators to add a note about why a resource or tenant has been placed in debug mode.  Single node Rug deployments may opt to use a local sqlite database and maintain roughly the same behavior as earlier releases.


 * All Astara project repositories have been updated to use the common oslo libraries. This change most significantly effected the Rug's messaging layer. The Rug is no longer rabbitmq specific and can be used with any supported oslo.messaging backend.  Operators should note that messaging configuration has moved from rabbit_user/rabbit_password/rabbit_host to a more generic amqp_url. See the example configuration file more information.


 * All projects have synced to Liberty's global-requirements, ensuring smooth installation into system namespaces shared by other OpenStack projects.


 * The Rug has been updated to support the Keystone V3 API via the use of Keystone sessions.


 * The base OS version of the appliance image has been updated from Debian wheezy to Debian jessie.

Upgrades notes

 * keystone service credentials are now configured in the [keystone_authtoken] section and existing admin_{user, password, tenant_name} and auth_url configuration options have been deprecated.


 * Appliance images are no longer built with a default administrative user/password pair and instead uses an ssh public key (specified in rug.ini) that is used for the administrative 'akanda' user.


 * Service VMs hostnames are no longer named ak-$router_name and instead ak-$tenant_uuid.


 * Existing rug-ctl 'router' commands (ie, rug-ctl router debug) have been deprecated in favor of more generic 'resource' commands (ie, rug-ctl resource debug).