OpenStack demonstrates harmony of stability and innovation with 25th release, Yoga

The OpenStack community has released Yoga, the 25th version of the world’s most widely deployed open source cloud infrastructure software. Yoga highlights include support for advanced hardware features such as SmartNIC DPUs, improved integration with cloud-native software such as Kubernetes and Prometheus and reduction of technical debt to maintain a stable and reliable OpenStack core.

OpenStack, the open infrastructure-as-a-service standard, is the one infrastructure platform for deployments of diverse architectures—bare metal, virtual machines (VMs), graphics processing units (GPUs) and containers. Over 12 years, the OpenStack project has maintained a consistent harmony between release stability and a steady pace of new use cases and technical innovation. With more than 25 million cores in production and over 180 public cloud data centers worldwide running OpenStack, the community has steadily integrated new technologies like Kubernetes over the project’s history, with more than 560,000 changes from over 8,700 contributors merged since 2012.

Ninety percent of the world’s largest telcos run OpenStack, and established users continue growing their deployments while new contributors like NVIDIA, the BBC and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts bring new use cases and technologies to the community. All this has happened against a backdrop of consistent usability improvements, enabling deployments sizes that range from a few dozen to millions of cores.

***The OpenStack Yoga release is available for download.***

“After 25 releases, the global OpenStack community continues to adapt and grow, building software that now runs on more than 25 million compute cores,” said Kendall Nelson, senior upstream developer advocate at the OpenInfra Foundation. “It’s amazing when you consider the scale of OpenStack: since 2012, our community has merged over 560,000 changes from over 8,700 contributors. Today, the Yoga release continues that momentum, evolving as OpenStack advances emerging use cases and new hardware architectures.”

Yoga Release Highlights

Over the span of just 25 weeks, almost 13,500 changes authored by over 680 contributors from more than 125 organizations and 44 countries were merged into the Yoga release. Feature advancements in Yoga include: 

Hardware enablement extended, specifically for SmartNIC DPUs. Neutron adds support for a remote-managed VNIC type, enabling port binding to SmartNIC DPUs. In addition, Nova now offers support for network backends that leverage SmartNICs to offload the controlplane from the host server. This enables increased security by removing the control plane from the host server and reduced overhead by leveraging the CPU and RAM resources on modern SmartNIC DPUs.

Local IP added to Neutron. This feature is primarily focused on high efficiency and performance of the networking data plane for very large-scale clouds, or clouds with high network throughput demands. Local IP is a virtual IP which can be shared across multiple ports or VMs, and guaranteed to only be reachable within the same physical server or node boundaries.

Soft delete scheme offered in Manila. File system shares can now be soft-deleted into a recycle bin where they can stay for a configurable amount of time before being purged. While they are in the recycle bin, shares can be viewed and restored on demand.

Cloud-native compatibility expanded for Prometheus and Kubernetes. 

Prometheus integration: Octavia load balancers now support deep observability by adding listeners that expose a Prometheus exporter endpoint. The Octavia amphora provider exposes over 150 unique metrics. Kolla adds support for deploying Prometheus Libvirt exporter.

Kubernetes integration: Kuryr adds enhanced debugging capabilities by including Kubernetes events to resources managed by Kuryr. Tacker introduces several new features to its Kubernetes Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM), including using Docker private registry images or Helm charts to deploy Container Network Functions (CNFs). 

Routine maintenance and updates in Yoga include:

In Ironic, the default deployment boot mode has changed from Legacy BIOS to UEFI.

Cinder adds new backend drivers: Lightbits LightOS for NVMe/TCP, a TOYOU NetStor Fibre Channel driver and NEC V Series Storage drivers (FC and iSCSI). Current backend storage drivers now have added support for features exceeding the required driver functions, for example, Active/Active replication.

In Kolla, binary images are deprecated, and any support for them will be removed in the next release. Users are requested to migrate to source based images.