Cloud infrastructure platform OpenStack has been released in version 19, dubbed Stein, improving support for edge computing and container usage, as well as resource management.

According to Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, the release “focuses on workloads people are running in the cloud today”, which increasingly means containers.

Since last year’s OpenStack user survey revealed that “Kubernetes integration is present in 61 per cent of the OpenStack deployments”, the OpenStack team has spent some time working on functionalities needed for containers.

Components benefiting from the initiative include Magnum, OpenStack’s Kubernetes installer, networking service Neutron, and bare metal provisioning project Ironic. Magnum is now able to deploy clusters quicker than before, while Ironic offers better deployment templates for standalone users.

Users looking to quickly launch a fully integrated Kubernetes cluster on an OpenStack cloud can do so now with support from the Manila, Cinder and Keystone services. Neutron’s accelerated port bulk creation helps in container use cases in which ports are created in groups, but the tool also gets a few enhancements to facilitate work in low resource environments.

One of them is an API extension for managing segment type ranges dynamically, which Bryce is sure will make a higher level of automation possible. In earlier releases administrators had to edit configuration files for this kind of management.

Neutron now also considers bandwidth a resource and takes the requested amount into account when choosing a host to schedule an instance to.

Speaking of resources, the updated resource reservation service Blazar comes with a resource allocation API, which lets admins check the state of their cloud resources.

Another enhancement in that area is Placement. The project was extracted from Nova and lets users target candidate resource providers, which can increase API performance for some scheduling operations

And if that isn’t enough, upgrading to the new version should be a little easier, since so-called upgrade checkers are now available as well. They can help administrators to find issues in their cloud infrastructure that would prevent an upgrade from succeeding.