Hi everyone, The Icehouse release is out, and the press release is live. Please retweet @openstack and promote the URL OpenStack.org/Icehouse. Congratulations and thanks to all who contributed. Early Press Coverage: OpenStack Icehouse release takes on enterprise upgrade concerns — GigaOm OpenStack Icehouse Features a Trove of Open-Source Cloud Updates — eWeek To Build Cloud-Services, Some Companies Adopt OpenStack — The Wall Street Journal OpenStack’s latest Icehouse release hits the streets — Network World OpenStack has wooed developers for years, now it’s time to charm users — GigaOm OpenStack Winning Business Converts — CIO Journal Helpful Materials: Icehouse Landing Page Press release Slide deck Technical Release Notes and documentation Icehouse Dashboard demo video Icehouse Graphic Key Stats: Over 1,200 contributors to Icehouse; a 32% increase from Havana release More than 120 organizations employed contributors to the Icehouse release Nearly 350 new features across the platform and more than 2,900 bug fixes, with an overall focus on testing, maturity and stability Dashboard now supports 16 languages including Serbian, Hindi, and German released in Icehouse. The Internationalization team translated nearly 700,000 words during the Icehouse cycle. Contributor stats: http://activity.openstack.org/dash/releases/index.html?data_dir=data/icehous... (Note: Icehouse stats include programs in incubation and the integrated release.) Release Highlights: Overall focus on stability and maturity for the integrated release, with new features like new rolling upgrades and better integration of services across the platform Raising the bar on testing for a consistent user experience across drivers, specifically storage platforms Big updates for Object Storage, including discoverability and a new replication process called s-sync that improves performance New Block Storage feature allowing for better performance management in heterogeneous environments First iteration of federated authentication allows users to access private and public OpenStack clouds with the same credentials The Database Service is now part of the integrated release, which allows users to manage relational database services in an OpenStack environment Analyst & User Quotes “OpenStack has crossed the threshold and will become another de facto IaaS standard before the end of the year, when OpenStack compatibility will be a must, not a nice-to-have.” — Source: Forrester Research, Inc., State Of Cloud Platform Standards: Q1 2014, March 2014 “We host several applications in our OpenStack environment. So, clearly, we’re heavily vested in OpenStack. Icehouse gives us several new capabilities that will make a big difference, including scheduler improvements and instance creation and deletion. Each OpenStack release makes impressive gains in maturity. It’s a march of progress that gives us confidence in the platform and the community.” — Mike Wilson, senior systems architect at Bluehost “Cloud computing has become strategic to our business by enabling our developers to move faster and providing a scalable infrastructure to deliver our content services. By using OpenStack, we are not only choosing a cloud platform, but a community in which we have the ability to influence the software roadmap, share knowledge among operators and build even stronger relationships with our technology vendors who are supporting the platform.” — Andrew Mitry, senior manager of platform infrastructure at Comcast Webinar Today Today at 11 am PDT, Mark Collier will host a webinar to discuss icehouse with Das Kamhout of Intel and Troy Toman of Rackspace, both of whom have experience operating OpenStack clouds. They will explain what’s new in the Icehouse release and how the voice of the user is coming through loud and clear in our maturing platform. OpenStack Summit The next OpenStack Summit will take place in Atlanta, May 12-16. Join us to learn more about how organizations are using OpenStack and the vibrant ecosystem behind it. Thanks, Lauren