The Essex release has a strong focus on cloud stability as a result of a release cycle change to allow for more quality assurance time. The OpenStack Diablo release came out in September 2011 after a six-month release cycle. With Essex, it was again a six-month release cycle, but the QA time was tripled and the feature freeze was moved to to six weeks before the release to allow extra time for stabilizing.

“We really expanded the QA cycle out in Essex to make thing solid and stable, coming out of this release cycle,” Jonathan Bryce, chairman of the Project Policy Board for OpenStack told InternetNews.com. “As result, people have been much happier with the state of where things are.” Read more here…