It's been a while since the last Swift release, but at long last I present to you OpenStack Swift 2.6.0: The Best Yet! Swift 2.6.0 is available to you today, and it's chock full of new features, bug fixes, and improvements to make your life better. As always, you can upgrade to this version of Swift with zero end-user downtime, and I recommend that everyone should upgrade. - Tarball: https://tarballs.openstack.org/swift/swift-2.6.0.tar.gz - Full Release Notes: https://github.com/openstack/swift/blob/master/CHANGELOG ---------------------------- Highlights from this release ---------------------------- Have you ever inherited running a Swift cluster from someone else, and you found out that the previous operator didn't really understand the concept of capacity management? In fact, you're convinced he used a dartboard to choose where to deploy new capacity. (And based on the drive failure rates you've been seeing, he might have actually been throwing the darts at the drives themselves.) Never fear! Swift 2.6.0 is here to help you. There's a new algorithm to rebalance Swift's rings to give you the best possible capacity balance across servers and racks without a huge amount of data moving around the cluster. In addition, we fixed a few corner cases so that you can't have more than one replica in the same place. Have you ever asked Swift for a listing of what objects are in a container? Of course you have! It's a great feature! But have you ever wanted to get that same list of things *in reverse order*? Of course you have! And now you can. Add a `?reverse=true` query parameter to your listing request, and you'll get the results in reverse order. Have you ever deployed a storage policy and then you found out you misspelled the policy name? Of course you have! You're just human. (Please don't coment on spleling erors in this mesage.) The problem is that your users have already started using the "glod" storage policy, and marketing sold the "gold" storage policy. Now with Swift 2.6.0 you can rename your policy to "gold" and leave "glod" as an alias for existing users. You can even give a short-name alias (eg "Au") to save those precious keystrokes. Swift now supports multiple names for a single storage policy. In this release, we're also added several quality-of-life improvements to the ops tools. For example, the `swift-ring-builder` will now show the time remaining until the next rebalance can be done. `swift-init` now has better return codes. `swift-recon` now correctly shows timestamps in UTC instead of sometimes using local time. A few important bugs were closed in this release, including OSSA-2016-004, which could result in a socket leak. Swift 2.6.0 is the work of 43 code contributors, including 16 who contributed code for the first time. Thank you to all who have contributed to Swift, via code or otherwise. If you'd like to get more involved, join us in #openstack-swift on freenode IRC. Enjoy! --John