In September of 2014, Cisco announced its intent to acquire Metacloud. For those of us working at Metacloud, it was an exciting day. There were so many things we wanted to do to create the ultimate Private Cloud as a Service offer that would delight our customers by removing the complexities of deploying, managing, operating, and updating their OpenStack-powered private clouds. Our team was comprised of great leaders from Ticketmaster and Yahoo!-leaders who had a wide range of experience in operating distributed systems at scale.

In June of 2015, Cisco acquired Piston to enable greater business agility and help lower costs as organizations shifted from a primarily on-premises IT structure to hybrid IT. At this point, our team (and our expertise) grew substantially. Working with other business units at Cisco, we assembled an offer that combined software, hardware, and expertise into an easy-to-consume, production-ready platform that can be deployed quickly and is backed by a 99.99% uptime SLA.

Since then, we've seen a four-fold customer increase, and our momentum is only growing, with 60% socket growth YoY for the latest quarter end.

Today, we're announcing the Metapod 4.0 GA Release, based on Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, an open source foundation for cloud deployments co-engineered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This represents an important shift in how we plan to deliver greater customer experiences moving forward. As curators of OpenStack, responsible for building and operating a platform long term, the underlying software matters. And based on our experience with customers and partners, we believe that more enterprises trust Red Hat for Linux and OpenStack software over other distributions.

Combining Red Hat's expertise in packaging a production-ready OpenStack distribution and our expertise in curating, managing, and operating it can result in a number of benefits. First, the collaboration with Red Hat will enable our teams to focus more on bringing OpenStack enhancements to customers. Up until now, our Cisco Metapod team resources have been devoted to stability in the form of testing, bug fixes, and evaluating features from trunk for readiness. The product and engineering coordination now allows us to utilize Red Hat for their expertise in these areas, helping to enable our teams to accelerate our roadmap and tackle customer feature requests around networking enhancements, multi-cloud management, support for storage devices, upstack capabilities around containers and microservices architectures, and more self-service capabilities.

Finally, our collaboration will help us to continue to meet our industry-leading SLAs and create new models for different types of use cases, all while providing upgrades and proactive monitoring, response, and resolution. As demand for Metapod continues to grow, we're now working to create offers aimed at Service Providers, as well as those who have regulatory compliance needs.

And in case you're wondering: No, this change won't impact our pricing at all. Metapod will continue to be an outstanding value, with a compelling ROI and industry-leading SLAs-available at exactly the same cost as it was before we shook hands with Red Hat.

Here are some of the technical benefits customers can expect in this release:

• Cloud administrators can define QoS at the port level for projects and instances. This gives customers more granular control of network bandwidth based on application requirements.

• Faster instances booted from a volume, thanks to a new caching system in place for the block storage system.

• Orchestration becomes more efficient thanks to parallel resource provisioning. New logic added to the orchestration service will allow for the creation of instances, networks, and key pairs. The Liberty release also supports many new resources for provisioning through the orchestration service.

• Access and Security gets more fine-grained role-based access control with new domain support. Now, customers can use domains to collect similar projects and users together and isolate them from each other. Different domains can also use different backing technologies for authentication, like LDAP or Active Directory.

If you'd like to learn more, visit Red Hat's blog on the release here. Have a question? Leave a comment or tweet me at @nikiacosta.