The OpenStack community today released Stein, the 19th version of the most widely deployed open source cloud infrastructure software.
Among the dozens of enhancements provided in Stein, three highlights are:
Kubernetes is the number one container orchestration framework running on OpenStack, with 61% of OpenStack deployments indicating they integrate the two platforms, according to the 2018 OpenStack User Survey.
In Stein, OpenStack continues to deliver the core infrastructure management features delivering the bare metal and network functionality that containers need:
Within Neutron, Network Segment Range Management enables cloud administrators to manage segment type ranges dynamically via a new API extension, as opposed to the previous approach of editing configuration files. This feature benefits StarlingX and edge use cases, where ease of management is critical.
For network-heavy applications, it is crucial to have a minimum amount of network bandwidth available. Work began during the Rocky cycle to provide scheduling based on minimum bandwidth requirements, and the feature was delivered in Stein. As part of the enhancements, Neutron treats bandwidth as a resource and works with the OpenStack Nova compute service to schedule the instance to a host where the requested amount is available.
API improvements boost flexibility, adding support for aliases to Quality of Service (QoS) policy rules that enable callers to execute the requests to delete, show and update QoS rules more efficiently.
Blazar, the resource reservation service, introduced a new Resource Allocation API allowing operators to query the reserved state of their cloud resources.
Placement is a new project introduced in the Stein release. Extracted from the Nova project, Placement offers the ability to target a candidate resource provider, easing the task of specifying a host for workload migration. This increases API performance by 50% for common scheduling operations. The internal Placement service in Nova will be removed by the Train release. At that point Nova installations should make use of the separate Placement service.
Sahara, a project for easily provisioning Hadoop clusters, has been refactored into a core+plugins architecture, making it easier to take advantage of this functionality.
Network Segment Range Management enables cloud administrators to manage segment type ranges dynamically via a new API extension in Neutron.
Source: Slawek Kaplonski, Neutron Core Contributor
The OpenStack identity service introduced multi-factor authentication receipts in the Stein release, which facilitates a much more natural sequential authentication flow.
The service for providing production-ready containers and deployment tools has added support for performing full and incremental backups of the MariaDB Database.
Driven by leadership from the Blizzard Entertainment team, APIs in the Senlin clustering service now issue synchronous failures in case of cluster/node lock, cooldown in effect or action conflict. Operators also can now remove completed actions using an action-purge subcommand in the senlin-manage tool. This is useful for long-running clusters that have accumulated a large number of actions in the database. Overall, upgrades made to Senlin in Stein can improve operations performance by several orders of magnitude.
To see more release highlights from the project teams, visit the Release Highlights page. Learn more about individual OpenStack Projects in the Project Navigator, and get the full view of OpenStack with the Project Map.
Thank you to the more than 1,400 contributors from more than 150 organizations that contributed to the Stein release.