After we announced our first preview of openATTIC 2 in June, our developers have been busy! To give you an impression of what we’ve been working on, we’ve now released version 2.0.1 as a beta release.

To recap, the major changes in openATTIC 2 when compared to the previous 1.2 release include:

A completely new web UI: we’ve replaced the old UI (which was based on ExtJS) with a more modern and intuitive one developed in Boostrap/AngularJS. This will hopefully make it much easier to navigate the user interface and to get tasks accomplished with fewer clicks. We’ve also started to implement „wizards“, that will guide you through the steps of common tasks, e.g. creating a network share or a block device for VM storage. If you have any additional ideas or suggestions for wizards you would like to see, please let us know!
The XML-RPC API has been replaced with a REST API, giving developers easy and full access to the openATTIC backend. This API is used by the new UI as well. The API recorder built into the web interface allows you to easily re-implement more complex storage management tasks by keeping a log of all API calls performed by the UI. You can then copy and integrate these into your own code, without having to consult the API documentation for each individual step.
Ceph integration: we’ve also begun to develop support for the Ceph distributed object store and file system, adding support for visualizing the CRUSH map and monitoring.

Between the initial 2.0.0 preview release and today’s 2.0.1 beta version, our developers have committed numerous usability improvements (e.g. adding input validations) and added more tests, to make the new UI robust and easy to use. Some notable functionality enhancements include:

The addition of the aforementioned wizards that guide the administrator through common tasks.
A Cluster Status Widget that provides a quick impression of a cluster’s actual health.
A possibility to mark volumes as „protected“, to protect them against accidental removal.
Implemented a better visual representation of a volume’s utilization level.
Additional functionality around the management of snapshots and clones of volumes.

Please note that we’ve also decided to drop support for creating ftp/tftp shares, as we consider ftp insecure and out of the scope of openATTIC’s key competencies.

This release has a few rough edges and there are still a number of loose ends that we intend to get fixed for the final release. In particular, some features from the previous UI are still missing, and the documentation still needs to be reviewed and updated to reflect the changes for the new web UI and the REST API. But we wanted to take this opportunity to show that we’re still around, making lots of progress, and to encourage you to give this beta a try.

You can download installable packages of version 2.0.1 for a number of Linux distributions from our download page. The source code is available from BitBucket (now including the openattic-gui repository that contains the new web UI).

If you would like to get in touch with us, consider joining our newly created openATTIC Users Group, or visit our #openattic channel on irc.freenode.net.

We look forward to your feedback!

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