Believe in yourself and you’re Xena — OpenStack’s 24th release hits with integration focus

Believe in yourself and you’re Xena — OpenStack’s 24th release hits with integration focus

The Open Infrastructure Foundation this week announced the release of the 24th version of cloud infrastructure project OpenStack. The update, which runs under the codename Xena, sees components getting better capabilities to work with advanced hardware features — and in fact with each other.

The OpenStack platform is constructed in a modular manner, with central components including compute service Nova, object storage service Swift, block storage service Cinder, shared file systems service Manila, networking service Neutron, dashboard Horizon, identity service Keystone, image service Glance, and data processing service Sahara. Since all of these are organised in quite independent projects, integration between components is a central theme of the release.

To make the most of available hardware for instance, more interaction between OpenStack Cyborg, Nova, and Neutron was needed. Their changes focused on peripheral component interconnect devices so that Nova can now create Nova servers with Neutron ports backed by PCI devices like SmartNICs that are managed by Cyborg, as Upstream Developer Advocate Kendall Nelson explained during a press call. 

Other examples for improved integration between projects highlighted are the support for the OpenStackClient in python-blazarclient, unified quotas in Glance via Keystone limits, and Manila increasing feature parity between its client shell utility and the OpenStack Client.

And other than that?

Nova gained two new nova-manage CLI commands for “checking the volume attachment connection information and for refreshing it if the connection is stale”. It also uses the new 2.90 API microversion so that “hostnames published by the metadata API service or config drives can be explicitly defined at instance creation time”. Cinder was reworked a little as well so that many of its backend storage drivers can take advantage of backend optimisations, and admins have a way to manage out of sync quotas.

Bare metal provisioning component Ironic now includes a fields selector in its driver API, capabilities to retrieve node history events and allow bootloaders to be copied into the configure network boot path, and endpoints to change boot modes and secure boot state of node.

The teams also took some time to clean things up. Cinder for example got rid of the previously deprecated Block Storage API v2, while the Horizon team added support for LTS release Node.js 14, and Neutron got fitted with a new quota driver that doesn’t lock resources and project IDs to prevent deadlocks.

According to the Open Infrastructure Foundation, OpenStack gained quite a bit of momentum in the last 18 months, growing from 15 million to more than 25 million OpenStack compute cores in production (however, eight million of those are attributed to users Workday, Walmart and China Mobile alone). 

Public cloud offerings built on OpenStack include the OVH Public Cloud, the Open Telekom Cloud, Rackspace’s Public Cloud, and the CT Cloud Platform, though it can also be found in IBM’s Bluemix Private Cloud and Canonical’s managed infrastructure products. An alternative can be found in the portfolio of the Apache Software Foundation in the form of Apache CloudStack.