We are pleased to announce the release of Libcloud 2.7.0.

Among various smaller bug fixes, this release also includes a couple of big new features.

Highlights include:

  • Initial type annotations / hints support for the base Libcloud compute API.
  • S3 driver class has been updated to support region argument in the same manner as other drivers which support multiple regions (no more messy class per region approach). For backward compatibility reasons, “class per region” approach will still be supported until the next major release.
  • New start_node() and stop_node() method have been added to the base Libcloud compute API and the existing drivers which implement ex_start_node() and ex_stop_node() methods have been updated to implement those new methods. Old ex_ methods will continue to work for backward compatibility reasons.

Full change log can be found at https://libcloud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/changelog.html#changes-in-apache-libcloud-v2-7-0.

Dropping support for Python 2.7 and Python 3.4

Libcloud was among some of the other early larger Python projects which have supported Python 2.x and Python 3.x simultaneously using a single code base from 2011.

Over the years, the landscape has changed a lot. A lot of the users now use Python 3 as a default and a lot of the popular Python projects now not only support Python 3, but also make Python 3 the only supported Python version.

In addition to that, Python 2.7 will not be maintained past January 2020.

We have decided to sign the Python 3 statement and drop support for Python 2.7 and Python 3.4 in the next major release (v3.0.0) which will coincide with Python 2.7 EOL early next year.

This means that Libcloud v2.7.0 will be the last major release which still supports Python 2.7 and 3.4.

The change itself is still work in progress. People who are interested in it can check the following PR https://github.com/apache/libcloud/pull/1377.

How does this affect me?

If you still need to use Python 2.7 or Python 3.4 after Libcloud v3.0.0 is out, you will be able to do that by utilizing one of the older Libcloud releases which still supports that Python version.

All the new feature development and improvements will land in new release which support Python >= 3.5 only, but we may still do a release in the v2.7.x release series if a major bug or a security issue is found.

How does this affect the Libcloud development team?

Supporting Python 2.x and Python 3.x through a single code base was never totally trivial.

This is especially true for our project which doesn’t use six Python 2 / 3 compatibility library, but uses custom glue / wrapper code for that.

There are multiple reasons why we didn’t use six - one is that we still needed to support Python 2.5 which is not supported by six and another one is that we didn’t want to introduce another dependency on the end user in the days where Python packaging was still very much in the infancy.

Dropping support for Python 2.7 and Python 3.4 will allow us to streamline our code and remove a lot of the code which is not needed anymore.

This will result in easier development and cleaner code.

Download

The release can can be downloaded from https://libcloud.apache.org/downloads.html or installed using pip:

pip install apache-libcloud==2.7.0

Upgrading

If you have installed Libcloud using pip you can also use it to upgrade it:

pip install --upgrade apache-libcloud==2.7.0

Upgrade notes

A page which describes backward incompatible or semi-incompatible changes and how to preserve the old behavior when this is possible can be found at https://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/latest/upgrade_notes.html

Documentation

Regular and API documentation is available at https://libcloud.readthedocs.org/en/v2.7.0/

Bugs / Issues

If you find any bug or issue, please report it on our issue tracker https://github.com/apache/libcloud/issues. Don’t forget to attach an example and / or test which reproduces your problem.

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who contributed and made this release possible! Full list of people who contributed to this release can be found in the CHANGES file.