The Icehouse release cycle brings several improvements to Horizon’s user experience, improved extensibility, and support for many additional features in existing projects. The community continues to grow. Read more for the specifics.
The number of OpenStack Compute (Nova) features that are supported in Icehouse grew. New features in the Icehouse release include:
In an ongoing effort to implement Role Based Access Support throughout Horizon, access controls were added in the OpenStack Volume (Cinder) related panels. Utilization of the Cinder v2 API is now a supported option in the Icehouse release. The ability to extend volumes is now available as well.
Display of Router Rules for routers where they are defined is now supported in Horizon.
With Icehouse, the ability for users to create containers and mark them as public is now available. Links are added to download these public containers. Users can now explicitly create pseudo directories rather than being required to create them as part of the container creation process.
In Icehouse, Horizon delivers support for updating existing Heat stacks. Now stacks that have already been deployed can be adjusted and redeployed. The updated template is also validated when updated. Additionally, support for adding environment files was included.
Horizon has added support for administrators to query Ceilometer and view a daily usage report per project across services through the OpenStack Dashboard to better understand how system resources are being consumed by individual projects.
The OpenStack Database as a Service project (Trove) is part of the integrated release in the Icehouse cycle. Improvements to the client connections and overall stability were added in the Icehouse cycle.
The primary dashboard and panel navigation has been updated from the tab navigation to an accordion implementation. Dashboards and Panel Groups are now expandable and collapsible in the page navigation. This change allows for the addition of more dashboards as well as accommodates the increasing number of panels in dashboards.
Horizon now provides a Wizard control to complete multi-step interdependent tasks. This is now utilized in the create network action.
Tables can now be written to support editing fields in the table to reduce the need for opening separate forms. The first sample of this is in the Admin dashboard, Projects panel.
Leveraging enhancements to Identity API v3 (Keystone), users can now change their own passwords without the need to involve an administrator. This functionality was previously only available with Identity API v2.0.
Tables can now easily be wired to filter results from underlying API calls based on criteria selected by the user rather than just perform an on page search. The first example of this is in the Admin dashboard, Instances panel.
In a move to provide a better user experience, Horizon has adopted AngularJS as the primary JavaScript framework. JavaScript is now a browser requirement to run the Horizon interface. More to come in Juno.
Horizon now boasts dynamic loading/disabling of dashboards, panel groups and panels. By merely adding a file in the enabled directory, the selection of items loaded into Horizon can be altered. Editing the Django settings file is no longer required.
For more information see Pluggable Settings
Horizon now supports running integration tests against a working devstack system. There is a limited test suite, but this a great step forward and allows full integration testing.
Django versions 1.4 - 1.6 are now supported by Horizon.
Beginning with the Icehouse cycle, there is now a requirement for JavaScript support in browsers used with OpenStack Dashboard.
The overall structure of the page layout in Horizon has been altered. Existing templates by 3rd parties to override page templates may require some rework.
The default for can_set_password is now False. This means that unless the setting is explicitly set to True, the option to set an ‘Admin password’ for an instance will not be shown in the Launch Instance workflow. Not all hypervisors support this feature which created confusion with users.
The default for can_set_mountpoint is now False, and should be set to True in the settings in order to add the option to set the mount point for volumes in the dashboard. At this point only the Xen hypervisor supports this feature.
To change the behavior around hypervisor management in Horizon you must add the OPENSTACK_HYPERVISOR_FEATURES setting to your settings.py or local_settings.py file.
For more information see OPENSTACK_HYPERVISOR_FEATURES
While Horizon supports managing Identity v3 entities and authenticating in a multi-domain Keystone configuration, there is a v3, v2.0 token compatibility issue when trying to manage resources for users outside the default domain. For this reason, v2.0 has been restored as the default API version for OpenStack Identity (Keystone). For a single domain environment, Keystone v3 API can still be used via the OPENSTACK_API_VERSION setting.