Our vision, mission, objectives and design principles serve as the framework for the definition of our long term roadmap and guide every aspect of our project by describing what we need to accomplish in order to continue to fulfill our promise of building a state-of-the-art open source toolkit that addresses the scalability, flexibility and security requirements of large-scale production systems.

The requirements of our users are the driving force behind all our development efforts. OpenNebula features fulfill real needs of leading IT organizations running production environments. Cloud Computing is a highly competitive market that presents challenges for the continued success of OpenNebula, we must ensure that we can deliver a product that is compelling to users in order to continue to be able to demonstrate our vision for the cloud. This requires us to be agile and flexible in order to quickly adapt to our user needs and the market challenges. So the roadmap needs to be flexible enough to deal with and take advantage of rapid changes in cloud and data center developments. This is the reason why we only publish our short-term roadmap, which is the description of the features planned for the next release of the software.

When we create the short-term roadmap and plan the features for the next release, we prioritize:

• The features demanded by the projects sponsoring the open-source project
• The features demanded by the organizations supporting the open-source project with a commercial subscription
• The most demanded features by users and integrators

You may use the development portal to make feature requests, just open a new issue and label it as Request. The issue will be used to track the discussions about the new feature. We try to contact you as soon as possible to have more information and to give you a first feedback about your request. Your Request issue will be pending till it is decided that is not in the scope of the project and closed, or it is interesting for the OpenNebula community and will be added as Backlog or Feature. Please consider that this can take some time, and it is usually not done until the next release cycle at the earliest.

At the beginning of each release cycle we organize a IRC meeting to discuss the requests for new features and for extending existing features. This valuable input to the planning meeting is used to create the short-term roadmap with the features that will be part of the release cycle. The final roadmap is described in a blog post after the planning meeting.

We will be also happy to discuss any ideas for next releases in the developers mailing list.

A detailed list of planed features for the upcoming release of OpenNebula is available in the development page.