A Is for OpenStack Antelope
Thirteen years ago, developers at the NASA Ames Research Center and Rackspace, independently came up with the idea for an open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud. Today, we call that cloud OpenStack. Now, after releasing Austin to Zed, the OpenInfra Foundation has released Antelope, the 27th version of the world’s most widely deployed open source cloud infrastructure software.
Today, it’s more than just an open source cloud, it’s become a component of the Linux, OpenStack, and Kubernetes Infrastructure (LOKI) trifecta stack. With the Antelope release, OpenStack brings a range of enhancements, including stronger integration with Kubernetes and other open source technologies, and expanded support for advanced hardware, catering to its rapidly growing user base.
New Release Cadence
Antelope introduces a new release cadence, allowing deployments to opt for once-a-year upgrades instead of the traditional six-month cycle. The 28th release, OpenStack Bobcat, is slated for October 2023 and will be a non-Skip Level Upgrade Release Process (non-SLURP) release.
This shift has been driven by OpenStack customers such as Red Hat, which uses OpenStack in its Red Hat OpenStack Platform (RHOP). Eoghan Glynn, Red Hat’s director of OpenStack engineering, explained, “Red Hat’s customers demand that we strike a balance between stability and recency.” This shift makes it easier for Red Hat and other OpenStack distributors to deliver this balance between the latest software and stability.
The 2022 OpenStack User Survey revealed that Kubernetes is now deployed on over 85% of OpenStack deployments. So, to improve its Kubernetes support in the Antelope release, Magnum, the OpenStack container orchestration service, has been updated to support Kubernetes v1.24 on Fedora CoreOS 36 and 37. It’s also been recertified as a Kubernetes orchestrator by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
OpenStack contributors have also expanded support for new hardware in the Antelope release. Cinder, its block-storage service, now provides backend drivers for HP XP iSCSI and FC, Fungible NVMe-TCP, and NetApp NVMe-TCP.
Ironic, the OpenStack bare metal provisioning service and not the Alanis Morissette song, now exports application metrics from the ironic-conductor service into the Prometheus real-time metrics event monitoring and alerting service. Previously these had only been accessible via statsd.
Thanks to changes in Nova, OpenStack’s Virtual Machine (VM) provisioning services, operators can manage the power consumption of dedicated CPUs. This enables you to reduce power consumption and costs, by offlining them or changing their governor, if they’re currently not in use by any instance or if the instance has been stopped.
As for security, OpenStack’s Network connectivity as a Service (NaaS) Neutron has implemented secure role-based access control (sRBAC). This is enforced by Glance, an image service that allows users to discover, retrieve, and register VM and container images and metadata.
Changes and Release Features
Altogether Antelope includes 9,794 changes authored by over 601 contributors from more than 110 organizations and over 40 countries. New features, security updates, and a tech preview project called Skyline, a dashboard, are among the release’s advancements.
In addition, the OpenInfra Foundation announced two new members of its Associate Member category: The Python Software Foundation and the Rust Foundation.
This is a natural step forward since both the Python and Rust programming languages are used in OpenInfra software projects. For example, OpenStack is built on Python. The OpenInfra Kata Containers community, which supports a container runtime that offers the speed of containers with VM security, is continuing its wholesale “Rustification” for better performance and security. Both Python and Rust are ideal for OpenInfra use cases, Python for high-level integration and Rust for low-level, secure infrastructure.
For a comprehensive list of Antelope release features, see the release notes. The OpenStack Antelope release is available for download now. Enjoy!
