OpenStack is known to release a new version every half year. As the last version, OpenStack Zed, was released in October 2022, we can only assume that the next version will be released in March or April 2023.  

So, a new OpenStack release is coming up, but what about the most current version? We will discuss the OpenStack Zed version in this blog. Fairbanks advises to use the second-last version because the last version is new and might have some unexpected issues or bugs, while the second-last version has been around for a while and in this case 6 months. Bugs and minor issues may have already been fixed during those 6 months and the release has already been experienced by users in different infrastructures, giving it more sense of security. 

However, if we don’t update continuously things can stagnate, which is never a good idea in IT and business overall. OpenStack Zed is the 26th version of OpenStack and in this blog, we share some major updates of this version. Off course more features are added if you would like to learn more you can visit it here: https://www.openstack.org/software/zed/  

What’s new? 

OpenStack Zed focusses mainly on enhancing security features and expanding hardware enablement. In addition, the OpenStack community is responding to user feedback through two new projects, Venus, which delivers log aggregation for large deployments, and Skyline, which promises an improved web UI. 

Security enhancements 

With Cinder, Block Storage API microversion 3.70 adds the ability for users to transfer encrypted volumes across projects. Previously only unencrypted volumes were supported to be transferred. Also all the snapshots associated with the volume will be transferred along with the encrypted volume. The Keystone team also added OAuth 2.0 support. 

Hardware enablement advanced, extending support to broader vendor footprint 

New backend drivers were added to Cinder: DataCore iSCSI and FC, Dell PowerStore NFS, Yadro Tatlin Unified iSCSI, Dell PowerStore NVMe-TCP, and Pure Storage NVMe-RoCE storage drivers. Cyborg now offers an Xilinx FPGA driver, which can manage Xilinx FPGA devices, including discovering devices’ info and programming xclbin. The community also proposes a spec of adding NVIDIA MIG for A100 devices. Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) is new feature in Cyborg that allows GPUs based on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture (such as NVIDIA A100) to be securely partitioned, which is different from VGPU feature; the MIG driver is needed to managed compatible with PGPU and VGPU. In Nova, Virtual IOMMU devices can now be created and attached to an instance when running on a x86 host and using the libvirt driver. 

Improved log aggregation for large deployments 

In conjunction with the Zed release, Venus is introduced as a one-stop log aggregation service tailored towards operators, allowing them to collect, clean, index, analyze, create alarms, visualize, and generate reports on OpenStack logs. Venus is of particular benefit to operators who are managing large OpenStack deployments, as it provides a way to quickly solve retrieved problems, grasp the operational health of the platform, and improve the level of platform management. 

Improved web UI 

Skyline is a new OpenStack dashboard project with original code contributed by 99Cloud. Using a technology stack based on React, Skyline features a more modern webapp architecture and is designed to handle user requests and multiple current commands more gracefully than Horizon. Skyline is considered by the OpenStack Technical Committee to be in an “emerging technology state,” not yet ready for production. 

Bug fixes 

A bug that is fixed is that placements used to return ironic nodes that have just started automatic cleaning as possible valid candidates. This is done by marking all ironic nodes with an instance on them as reserved, such that nova only makes them available once we have double checked Ironic reports the node as available. If you don’t have automatic cleaning on, this might mean it takes longer than normal for Ironic nodes to become available for new instances. If you want the old behaviour use the following workaround config: [workarounds]skip_reserve_in_use_ironic_nodes=true 

Another bug fix is that Apache mod_wsgi didn’t support passing commandline arguments to the wsgi application that it hosts. As a result when the nova api or metadata api where run under mod_wsgi it was not posible to use multiple config files or non-default file names i.e. nova-api.conf This has been adressed by the intoduction of a new, optional, envionment varible OS_NOVA_CONFIG_FILES. OS_NOVA_CONFIG_FILES is a ; seperated list fo file path relitive to OS_NOVA_CONFIG_DIR. When unset the default api-paste.ini and nova.conf will be used form /etc/nova. This is supported for the nova api and nova metadata wsgi applications. 

In addition 

A workaround has been added to the libvirt driver to catch and pass migrations that were previously failing with the error: 

libvirt.libvirtError: internal error: migration was active, but no RAM info was set 

You can find more information about this through the following link: https://bugs.launchpad.net/nova/+bug/1982284  

Those were the highlights of OpenStack Zed. What do you think of it, are you working with Zed or are you waiting for the new release?