Since its first release in 2010, OpenStack has released major updates for the open infrastructure every 6 months. Rather than going by version number, they use the alphabet to identify these releases by giving each update a name with the next letter in the alphabet. Nearly a year ago I wrote a blog about OpenStack Ussuri, now it’s time to examine the latest release ‘OpenStack Wallaby’ a little closer.

Wallaby is already the 23rd version of the most widely deployed open source cloud infrastructure software. The version, Ussuri, highlights the vibrancy and engagement of developers all over the world in supporting the third most active open source project. It does this alongside the Linux kernel and Chromium.

With dozens of projects, there are lots and lots of updates in Wallaby, but here are some of the notable updates we see in this release. The Wallaby release strengthens open infrastructure for cloud native applications with enhanced security and integration with other open source technologies. More than 17,000 code changes authored by over 800 contributors from 140 different organizations and 45 countries were merged into the release. In addition to delivering a wide range of improvements to the stable and reliable OpenStack core and its highly flexible project integration capabilities, Wallaby delivers security enhancements including fallback permissions and RBAC improvements in Ironic, Glance and Manila, and the community focused this cycle on migrating the RBAC policy format from JSON to YAML. Additionally, the Ironic project has extended functionality for UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), including secure erase for NVME.

Furthermore, Tacker which is an NFV orchestration, added new features to align with the standards defined by ETSI NFV including the addition of APIs for scale, update and rollback operations for virtual network functions (VNF) and fundamental VNF lifecycle management support for subscriptions and notifications.

Moreover, Nova (compute provisioning) and Cyborg (accelerator management) integration continues to progress. New functionality gives users the ability to shelve and unshelve augmented servers, Nova servers with Cyborg accelerators attached. Cinder (block storage) added new backend drivers, and many current drivers have added support for features exceeding the minimum required driver functions, with revert to snapshot and backend QoS being particularly popular this cycle.

So, as we see OpenStack keeps on improving and developing the cloud infrastructure. Not only does it improve and develop but it also adds extensions, nearly with each new release. We can say that OpenStack is the most extensive and reliable private cloud infrastructure solution available today. With an active community and the features further extended, it is more suitable for more and more use cases.

There you have it. Update your YAML to ‘Wallaby’ and deploy away, we will definitely be doing the same in our open infrastructure lab and will add the release to our upgrade program.