[workspace-announce] Announcing a new Nimbus RC1

[Kate Keahey]

We are happy to announce the release candidate of a new Nimbus release!

The star of this release is unquestionably Nimbus Platform: a set of tools that make infrastructure clouds from many providers easier to use. While our focus has always been on providing capabilities for infrastructure outsourcing across the stack, in the last few years Nimbus was best known for its IaaS implementation (Nimbus Infrastructure). With this release we are emphasizing our focus on the “platform layer”: tools that make management of resources across different infrastructure cloud providers easier. Besides to the already familiar context broker, this release contains cloudinit.d – a tool that enables repeatable and coordinated deployment of multiple inter-dependent VMs over many infrastructure clouds. Future Nimbus Platform releases this year will contain tools that facilitate cloud use for automatic scaling and high availability. In addition, this release also contains significant improvements to the Nimbus Infrastructure (see below).

To allow users to flexibly access the best tools for their needs, we also decided to make changes to our packaging and release structure: Nimbus Infrastructure as well as all individual Nimbus Platform tools will be packaged and released separately, inheriting the versioning from their last release. Consequently, this release contains the following downloads:

Nimbus Infrastructure 2.8, containing several features that improve VM deployment performance and flexibility as well as numerous bugfixes.
Nimbus Platform Context Broker  2.8
Nimbus Platform cloudinit.d 1.0
 
In addition to the committers who all contributed to this release we would like to acknowledge the help from Jamie Chen, David Foster, Kyle Fransham, Adam Smith, and Dan Yocum. 
 
The release is available for download at:
http://www.nimbusproject.org/downloads/

Documentation is available at:

Nimbus Infrastructure: http://www.nimbusproject.org/docs/2.8/
Nimbus Platform Context Broker: http://www.nimbusproject.org/doc/ctxbroker/
Nimbus Platform cloudinit.d: http://www.nimbusproject.org/doc/cloudinitd/


Kate Keahey
Mathematics and CS Division, Argonne National Laboratory
Computation Institute, University of Chicago