Tokyo here we come and a v1.2 sneak peek

Next week sees the OpenStack community heading to Tokyo for their semi-annual summit.  Several intrepid members of the Calico team will be there and, while we don’t have a booth ourselves, we’re always very happy to talk to anyone about Calico, whether you’re a potential partner, user or just someone who wants to understand why “L3 networking FTW”!

If you’d like to chat, then we’ve various options for getting in touch, including our new calico-users Slack team – get an invite and then use the #openstack channel to let us know you’ll be there.  Alternatively, you can also reach most of us via Twitter – I’m @eepyaich and we’ll have Neil (@neiljerram) and Jon (@itsflynn) in Tokyo as well.

Coinciding with next week’s summit, and hot on the heels of the OpenStack Liberty release, we’re also planning to release Calico v1.2 on Monday.  For this release, in addition to full support for Liberty (of course!), we’ve made several changes to improve the performance and occupancy of Felix, which is used across all of the Calico integrations.  Another enhancement that we think will be particularly exciting to OpenStack users is the ability for the Felix agent on each compute host to provide status information back to OpenStack on  

• the liveness of Felix itself – this allows OpenStack to spot when a host is unable to create new VMs
• whether Felix has been able to successfully program routing and iptables for a new VM – this allows OpenStack to spot when a VM has not been created successfully, report it to the user and, potentially, retry the VM elsewhere.

While we’re still working on the OpenStack Liberty packaging, if you are interested in getting a sneak peek of the 1.2 release you can check out our pre-release source code and packages at https://github.com/projectcalico/calico/releases/tag/1.2.0-pre2-felix.

I look forward to seeing many of you next week in Tokyo!