OpenStack Releases Ussuri, Launches Virtual OpenDev Events
On Wednesday, 10 a.m. CDT, the OpenStack Foundation will release OpenStack Ussuri, the 21st version of the now decade-old open source cloud infrastructure software. The release offers a broad swath of changes to numerous individual projects, which fall along three primary themes: the reliability of the core infrastructure layer, enhancements to security and encryption capabilities, and support for new and emerging use cases.
In a virtual press briefing, OpenStack Foundation Chief Operating Officer Mark Collier explained that the direction of OpenStack was actually driven in many ways by the hardware upon which it ran and the demands of these new and emerging use cases.
“In terms of the roadmap, I think that what we continue to see is just that the demands of the infrastructure layer continue to change because of what’s happening at other layers of the stack. So, you see more and more demands of workloads in terms of AI and machine learning, which then creates requirements for new architectures from a compute standpoint,” said Collier. “There’s an incredible amount of innovation going on in these different layers. We sometimes think of them independently, but the reality is, it’s the work that’s running on the clouds that drives the innovation.”
Thus far, the open source software saw 24,000 code changes by 1,003 developers from 188 different organizations, putting it among the top three open source projects according to active contributions.
Traditionally, the latest version of OpenStack might be delivered around the time of the Open Infrastructure Summit, where OpenStack developers gather in-person to showcase changes and plan out the milestones of the year ahead, but this year the release has arrived separately, alongside news of a virtual OpenDev event series throughout the summer and a virtual Project Teams Gathering (PTG) June 1-5, to replace the PTG that would have taken place in person at the summit.
While the Vancouver Open Infrastructure Summit originally slated for early June has been canceled, another summit is tentatively scheduled for October in Berlin. For the time being, Collier explained that there were some upsides to moving to purely virtual events.
“As you all know, we’ve been getting together and organizing events all around the world for many years. It’s been an important part of how our community connects and plans future versions of software and talks about where we want to go from here. Like everyone else, we’re adapting,” said Collier. “Although we’re sad we’re not going to be in person, we’re excited because this does open up some flexibility to be inclusive to people who maybe couldn’t have flown before. It’s not always easy to fly across the world. It’s very expensive, time-consuming — so moving it online has some downsides, but there’s a lot of upsides.”
The OpenDev event series will consist of three separate events, with each focusing on a different challenge in cloud infrastructure and looking at how to address the challenge with open source software — not just OpenStack software. The series will consist of:
- Large-scale Usage of Open Infrastructure Software — June 29-July 1
- Hardware Automation — July 20-22
- Containers in Production — August 10-12
As for the updates to OpenStack included in the Ussuri release, they were numerous and include:
- Cyborg (accelerator life cycle management) integration with Nova (compute service) has been completed. Users can now use Nova to launch server instances with accelerators managed by Cyborg. See accelerator operation guide to find which instance operations are supported.
- Ironic (bare metal service) has added automated bare metal hardware provisioning.
- Kolla (containerized deployment of OpenStack) has added initial support for TLS encryption of backend API services, providing end-to-end encryption of API traffic. Currently, Keystone is supported.
- Kuryr (bridge between OpenStack and container networking) has added support for IPv6.
- Nova (compute service) has added support for cold migrating and resizing servers between Nova cells.
- Octavia (load balancer service) has added support for deploying load balancers in specific availability zones, which enables the deployment of load balancing capabilities to edge environments. Also, Octavia users can now specify the TLS ciphers acceptable for listeners and pools, which allows load balancers to enforce security compliance requirements.
- Zun (containers service) has added support for Kubernetes CRI runtime. Zun uses CRI runtime to realize the concept of capsule (pod). As a result, Kubernetes can use Zun API to create pods including in secure Kata Containers.
In addition to the news of the latest release and virtual events, OpenStack Foundation executive director Jonathan Bryce took time to describe a new venture called OpenInfra Labs, which he said originally formed in academic and research environments. The OpenInfra Labs page describes the project as “a community, created by and for operators, testing open source code in production, publishing complete, reproducible stacks for existing and emerging workloads, to advance open source infrastructure,” and offers a manifesto to further describe its goals.
Feature image: Ussuri River, taken by Andshel, CC BY-SA 3.0.
