AUSTIN, Texas, April 26, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- In a move to drive
greater cloud interoperability, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it
has contributed significant new features to the RefStack Project,
which was created as part of the OpenStack community's effort to
drive interoperability across clouds. The ability to move data and
apps from one cloud to another is a major obstacle in the evolution
of cloud and business.
RefStack, officially launched last year and to which IBM is the
lead contributor, is a critical pillar of IBM's commitment to
ensuring an open cloud – helping to progress the company's
long-term vision of mitigating vendor lock-in and enabling
developers to use the best combination of cloud services and APIs
for their needs.
RefStack's new functionality includes improved usability,
stability and other upgrades, ensuring better cohesion and
integration of cloud workloads running on OpenStack.
RefStack testing ensures core operability across the OpenStack
ecosystem, and passing RefStack is a prerequisite for all OpenStack
certified cloud platforms. By working on cloud platforms which are
OpenStack certified, developers will know their workloads are
portable across IBM Cloud and the OpenStack community.
"The OpenStack ecosystem is very rich and rapidly evolving, and
provides an extremely strong foundation for real interoperability.
However, achieving this will require deep, sustained collaboration
across the open community," said Angel
Diaz, Vice President of Cloud Architecture and Technology at
IBM. "We are ready and willing to work with every single OpenStack
cloud provider on this, and are challenging the OpenStack community
to collaborate with us. We are determined to provide customers with
the flexibility they want – regardless of their provider – so that
they have a global platform for business and innovation."
At the OpenStack Summit in Austin,
Texas, IBM also announced a formal challenge to community
members, asking them to pledge participation in the first-ever
October 2016 Interop Challenge. This
project will directly work towards building a core language between
OpenStack cloud providers by building and deploying test cases for
real-world activities performed by everyday users of OpenStack
across environments. In October 2016,
it will culminate in a public demonstration of interoperability
across on-premises, public and hybrid OpenStack cloud
deployments.
As the primary resource for cloud providers to test OpenStack
compatibility, RefStack also maintains a central repository and API
for test data, allowing community members visibility into
interoperability across OpenStack platforms.
The specific upgrades to the upcoming RefStack release
include:
- User functionality and usability enhancements to
allow easier, more streamlined visibility into test data for
OpenStack release compatibility.
- Tempest plug-in enablement to allow users to expand
existing test suites to include external test cases.
- Stability enhancements to expand the availability
of the RefStack service and support a growing number of RefStack
users.
Additionally, RefStack will soon enable vendor registration,
allowing community members to easily correlate test results in
RefStack's central repository with specific OpenStack vendors –
ensuring results are more transparent.
For more information on IBM Cloud and its work with the
OpenStack community, visit here.
Media Contact
Erin Lehr
IBM Media Relations
1 (212) 671-9363
edlehr@us.ibm.com
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SOURCE IBM