ReleaseNotes/Austin

= Release Notes, Austin = The Austin release is the first OpenStack release which combines the Swift and Nova projects.

What's New in OpenStack
These sections contain what is implemented in time for the October 21, 2010 release.

Access Control Lists and Public Containers for Object Storage
You can now implement access control for objects either for users or accounts. Examples:

X-Container-Read: accountname X-Container-Write: accountname:username

Allows any user from the accountname account to read but only allows the username user from the groupname account to write.

You can also grant public access to objects stored in Object Storage (Swift) but also limit public access using the Referer header to prevent site-based content theft such as hot-linking (for example, linking to an image file from off-site and therefore using other's bandwidth).

The public container settings are used as the default authorization over access control lists. For example, using X-Container-Read: referer:any allows anyone to read from the container regardless of other authorization settings.

User-definable Metadata for ObjectStorage Accounts and Containers
This release implements user-definable metadata for both accounts and containers, similar to the implementation for objects.

Statistics for Object Storage
By aggregating raw log files into hourly totals and displaying these stats based on quarter, month, week, or day, you can monitor statistics on your Object Storage containers. The output is a .csv file that contains the following values:
 * Operations
 * Get
 * Head
 * Post
 * Put
 * Total operations
 * Public bandwidth
 * Incoming bandwidth
 * Outgoing bandwidth
 * Requests
 * Request types
 * Account
 * Container
 * Object
 * Response codes
 * 2xx (responses in the 200s)
 * 4xx
 * 5xx
 * Service bandwidth
 * Incoming bandwidth
 * Outgoing bandwidth
 * Requests
 * Storage
 * Account count
 * Bytes used
 * Container count
 * Object count

Rescue Mode
Allow users to fix file system and configuration errors by following these basic steps: shutting down the VM and then creating new a VM with a rescue image with a random password as primary and customer VM disk as secondary image. This is just a new slice, with the old disk attached.

Redis Optional
The prerequisites for OpenStack Compute have changed so that it's optional to use Redis the key-value pair store for authentication.

Xen Hypervisor Support
In addition to KVM, user-mode-linux and Xen Server, Nova supports Xen classic in the Austin release by adding a libvirt domain xml template with a "xen" option as well as using the Xen API, however, the Xen API implementation is not completely finished.

Security Groups Implementation
EC2 and Eucalyptus APIs both contain a firewalling concept known as security groups. People migrating from EC2 (or Eucalyptus) may be using security groups as part of their security model. To use this feature, look for a filter in libvirt for each security group. Once the last instance owned by a given user is removed from a node, the filter is undefined (removed).

OpenStack Clients
The OpenStack Web Control Panel is available as a preview. It is a web application to manage OpenStack compute and storage and currently offers a user login and cloud server management only. Prerequisites for using the web application are having Ruby and the Sinatra Ruby gem installed.

Image File Management (Partial Implementation)
A virtual machine image registry service and caching proxy has basic support in Austin. The image registry and caching proxy, called Glance, has been created and the basic registraty functionality completed. Nova now includes basic integration with Glance's image registry service, but the feature is currently not enabled by default, and is currently only relevant for Nova when using the OpenStack API. When Nova uses the EC2 API, the existing S3-like objectstore is used for VM image storage. Learn more about the implementation by reading the GlanceAPISpec.

Known Limits

 * Images without ramdisks are not supported at this time. Unfortunately this means the Official Ubuntu AMI's will not run.  We will provide alternative images until this is fixed in a later release.
 * IPv6 is not yet implemented in this release.
 * Hyper-V is not implemented in Austin. However, support for Microsoft Hyper-V has been started and is scheduled to be included in the next trunk series shortly after Austin is released.
 * OpenStack Object Store does not support objects larger than 5 GB.