OpenStack Releases and Distributions

OpenStack Releases and Distributions

OpenStack’s major release cadence switched from every three months to six months starting with the Essex release. The Pike release date is tentative as of the date of this writing. Successive releases are alphabetically incremented. Hence, the release intended for March of 2018, by convention, will start with the letter “Q.”

Release Date
Austin October 2010
Bexar February 2011
Cactus April 2011
Diablo September 2011
Essex April 2012
Folsom October 2012
Grizzly April 2013
Havana October 2013
Icehouse April 2014
Juno October 2014
Kilo April 2015
Liberty October 2015
Mitaka April 2016
Newton October 2016
Ocata February 2017
Pike September 2017
Queens February 2018

Table 2.1: OpenStack Releases to Date

Additionally, for each major version a stable branch is maintained. These branches represent a centralized effort to maintain bugfixes and security vulnerability patches for released OpenStack project versions in a ready-to-deploy form.

OpenStack is often consumed through one of a variety of prepackaged methods (for example: Red Hat Enterprise Linux - OpenStack Platform, Rackspace Private Cloud Software, Canonical Ubuntu, SUSE OpenStack Cloud, Mirantis OpenStack, and a growing variety of other options). Additional distributions or packaged appliances (for example, Nebula) from leading technology vendors are currently under development, are in preview, or are generally available today.

This document is intended to be broadly applicable to deployment with distributions meeting the OpenStack Foundation’s requirements for a compliant software distribution.