OpenStack contributors deliver a host of enhancements to support rapidly expanding user base: new release cadence, hardware enablement features, stronger integration with Kubernetes and other open source technologies
AUSTIN, Texas, March 22, 2023 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The OpenStack community today released Antelope, returning to "A" in its alphabetical release-naming protocol as it issues the 27th version of the world's most widely deployed open source cloud infrastructure software. OpenStack is central to the LOKI trifecta (Linux, OpenStack, and Kubernetes Infrastructure), the open source standard for running modern cloud infrastructure. In Antelope, OpenStack contributors deliver a host of enhancements to the software's rapidly expanding user base (166% increase in compute cores since 2020), including: a new release cadence, stronger integration with Kubernetes and other open source technologies, and expanded support for advanced hardware.
*New Release Cadence*
Antelope is the first in a new release cadence designed to ease the demands upon operators to upgrade every six months. Deployments will now be able to opt into a once-a-year upgrade cycle, upgrading with every Skip Level Upgrade Release Process or "SLURP" release. "Not-SLURP" releases will be available in each six-month interim for those who wish to upgrade more frequently. Antelope is a SLURP release; OpenStack Bobcat, the 28th release of OpenStack, is a non-SLURP release slated for October 2023.
"Red Hat's customers demand that we strike a balance between stability and recency. To meet their needs, our OpenStack distribution had pivoted away from twice-yearly releases in favor of less frequent upgrades spanning multiple upstream versions," said Eoghan Glynn, director of OpenStack engineering at Red Hat. "The Antelope release marks a new era for us, with community support for testing compatibility between non-adjacent versions under the new SLURP cadence. The flexibility shown by the community in reaching this compromise shows how resilient the OpenStack project continues to be, as usage of our awesome technology evolves."
*Integration with Kubernetes*
According to the 2022 OpenStack User Survey, Kubernetes is now deployed on over 85% of OpenStack deployments: 73% through vanilla Kubernetes itself. The rise in OpenStack and Kubernetes production integrations is further documented by an increase to 21% (up from just 16% last year) of users running production workloads with Magnum, the OpenStack service for container orchestration.
In Antelope, Magnum has been updated to support Kubernetes v1.24 running on Fedora CoreOS 36 and 37. Magnum has also been recertified as a Kubernetes orchestrator, passing the software conformance testing hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). This certification ensures that every vendor's version of Kubernetes supports the required APIs; for organizations using Kubernetes, conformance enables interoperability from one Kubernetes installation to the next.
"This cross-community certification is important for OpenStack operators because it ensures that the software delivered by the community meets the list of conformance tests defined by the developers from Kubernetes, and it makes sure all releases Magnum are aligned with the quality of service," said Guilherme Steinmüller, senior OpenStack engineer at VEXXHOST.
*Hardware Enablement*
In Antelope, OpenStack contributors continue to expand support for new hardware. For example:
- Cinder added new backend drivers (HPE XP iSCSI and FC, Fungible NVMe-TCP, NetApp NVMe-TCP storage drivers) and added features to existing vendor drivers.
- Ironic can now export application metrics from the ironic-conductor service into Prometheus, alongside hardware metrics. Previously these were only accessible via statsd.
"With OpenStack deployments growing exponentially, our community has provided in the Antelope release not only the maintenance required to uphold OpenStack's reputation for stability but also expanded support for new hardware and software integrations," said Kendall Nelson, senior upstream developer advocate at the OpenInfra Foundation. "The Antelope release reflects this, for example, in security enhancements in Neutron and Glance, the hardware enablement advancements in Cyborg, and the recertification of Magnum as a Kubernetes orchestrator. We are grateful for the dedicated developers who keep OpenStack at the forefront of cloud computing and to the committed organizations who support their efforts."
*Additional Highlights of the Antelope Release*
The Antelope release comprises 9,794 changes authored by over 601 contributors from more than 110 organizations and over 40 countries. Advancements in Antelope include:
- New Features:
- - Designate zones can now be shared across multiple projects.
- - Ironic adds support for sharding Ironic nodes using a shard-key, to enable external API clients to horizontally scale.
- - Operators can now ask Nova to manage the power consumption of dedicated CPUs so as to either offline them or change their governor, if they're currently not in use by any instance or if the instance is stopped.
- - PCI devices can now be scheduled by Nova using the Placement API on an opt-in basis. This will help the nova-scheduler service to better schedule flavors that use PCI (non-Neutron related) resources, generate less reschedules if an instance cannot be created on a candidate, and not miss valid candidates if the list was too large.
- - Horizon added port forwarding support for the Floating IPs. Users can now perform PortForwarding CRUD operations to the Network Floating IPs using Horizon.
- Security Updates:
- - Neutron has implemented secure role-based access control (sRBAC).
- - Glance enforces sRBAC.
In addition, Skyline, a tech preview project, now integrates with Magnum, Zun and Keystone.
***For a more detailed list of Antelope release features, please see the release notes.**
*About OpenStack*
Launched in 2012, OpenStack is the one infrastructure platform for deployments of diverse architectures—bare metal, virtual machines (VMs), graphics processing units (GPUs) and containers. Now more than a decade old and oft-praised for its "boring" stability, OpenStack is alive and thriving, with more than 40 million cores in production and over 300 public cloud data centers worldwide running the software. Today, OpenStack is one of the top 4 most active open source projects in the world, boasting more than 586,000 changes from over 9,000 contributors since 2012.
Ninety percent of the world's largest telcos run OpenStack, and established users continue growing their deployments. The Million Core Club now comprises seven organizations that each have more than 1 million OpenStack cores in production. The 2022 OpenStack user survey documented that organizations of all sizes are scaling significantly to address the requirements of their end users. Many of these organizations—including Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), Bloomberg, Boston University, CERN, Cleura, Huawei, LINE, MET Norway, Nipa Cloud, Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences, Samsung SDS, SAP, Schwarz IT and Viettel—will be presenting their OpenStack use cases and best practices at the upcoming OpenInfra Summit in June.
*OpenInfra Summit and Project Teams Gathering (PTG) is Live in Vancouver, June 2023*
The OpenInfra Summit will be held June 13-15 at the Vancouver Convention Centre. Attendees will collaborate directly with the people building and running open source infrastructure using Linux, OpenStack, Kubernetes and 30+ other technologies. The PTG, which will run concurrently, is an event organized by the OpenInfra Foundation to allow various technical community groups working on open infrastructure projects to meet, exchange ideas and get work done in a productive setting. The OpenInfra Summit agenda is available here, and the Forum and PTG schedules will be available soon. The OpenInfra Summit will be a limited-capacity, sellout event. The ticket prices will increase on May 5 at 11:59 p.m. PT, so register today.
*About the Open Infrastructure Foundation*
The OpenInfra Foundation builds communities that write open source infrastructure software that runs in production. With the support of over 110,000 individuals in 187 countries, the OpenInfra Foundation hosts open source projects and communities of practice, including infrastructure for AI, container native apps, edge computing and datacenter clouds. Join the OpenInfra movement: http://www.openinfra.dev
Media Contact
Allison Price, OpenInfra Foundation, 5128278633, [email protected]
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