RightScale unveiled the September 2013 release last week, with several exciting improvements:
- Tag sync between RightScale and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) makes it easier to organize and report on your environments.
- The latest 13LTS and 13.5 Infinity ServerTemplates™ include new clouds, new features, and new stacks.
- Automated cookbook metadata generation streamlines the building of ServerTemplates using community Chef cookbooks.
- OpenStack Neutron Networks and Availability Zones support brings OpenStack Grizzly to the RightScale platform.
Let's look at each in a bit more detail.
Tag Sync Between RightScale and AWS EC2
You've asked for better resource visibility between RightScale and the AWS Console. With the September 2013 release, tags sync both ways between RightScale and AWS EC2. All tags sync from EC2 to RightScale, while tags with specific syntax sync from RightScale to EC2. Tag sync can help you better organize RightScale-launched resources in the AWS Console, in the command line interface, and on your AWS bill. In addition, you can more easily use RightScale Report Manager and Deployments for resources launched via the AWS Console or CLI. EC2 tag sync is available for customers on the Unified Cloud Platform.
ServerTemplate 13.5LTS Release
The newest ServerTemplate Long Term Support (LTS) release contains many new features to help you build your applications in RightScale. In addition to supporting Windows Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Rackspace Open Cloud, and Rackspace Managed Open Cloud for the first time in an LTS release, we've also added brand new ServerTemplates, including ones for Memcached, PostgreSQL 9, Tomcat 7, and Django.
Additional ServerTemplate 13.5LTS improvements include:
- New recipe to use public IP addresses to set DNS records
- New Windows Server and SQL Server images on Windows Azure
Automatic Chef Cookbook Metadata Generation
You no longer need to generate a metadata.json file to use Chef cookbooks in the platform. If there is a valid metadata.rb file, RightScale can use the cookbook as-is. This functionality combined with top-level cookbook support from our last release means that you can quickly and easily add most community cookbooks to your RightScale account for use in ServerTemplates. Automatic Chef cookbook metadata generation is available to all accounts.
OpenStack Neutron Networks and Availability Zones
Continuing our support for OpenStack Grizzly, this release now includes Neutron Networks (formerly known as Quantum). Neutron enables OpenStack tenants to build rich networking topologies and configure advanced network policies. In this release we support Neutron networks, subnets, and ports.
We also support OpenStack Availability Zones to improve high availability. OpenStack Availability Zones, not to be confused with AWS Availability Zones, represent physically partitioned sets of Nova instances or Cinder volumes that often have separate power supplies, networking equipment, and hardware specifications.
Additional Release Improvements
In addition to those highlights, the September 2013 release supports several more features:
- Report Manager now includes AWS Provisioned IOPS pricing
- Support for Google Compute Engine machine types without local disks
- Network Gateways in the Network Manager UI and API
To see these features in action, try RightScale for free.
