The OpenStack community has released Victoria. It’s the 22nd version of this open source cloud infrastructure software. With the Victoria release, the OpenStack community once again intends to reinforce virtual machine and bare metal performance at massive scale.
In addition to delivering a wide range of further improvements to the OpenStack core and its flexible project integration capabilities, Victoria would come with some innovative new features including:
- Enhancements to native integration with Kubernetes
- Additional support for diverse architectures and standards
- Progressive solutions for complex networking issues
OpenStack is supported by a large, global open source community. For the Victoria release, OpenStack received over 20,000 code changes by over 790 developers from 160 different organizations and over 45 countries.
OpenStack pioneered the concept of open infrastructure 10 years ago. Since then, it has been deployed widely to establish Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings. Recently, new workload demands like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, edge computing and IoT have given rise to the project’s support for new chip architectures, automation at scale down to the bare metal, and integration with myriad open source components.
OpenStack now powers more than 75 public cloud data centers and thousands of private clouds at a scale of more than 15 million compute cores. OpenStack is suited to deployments of diverse architectures including bare metal, virtual machines (VMs), graphics processing units (GPUs) and containers.
Highlights of the Victoria Release
Additional native integration with Kubernetes
- Kuryr – a bridge between containers frameworks, networking models and OpenStack networking abstraction, has implemented support for custom resource definitions (CRDs). Kuryr will no longer use annotations to store data about OpenStack objects in the Kubernetes API. Instead, corresponding CRDs (KuryrPort, KuryrLoadBalancer and KuryrNetworkPolicy) are created.
- Tacker – an OpenStack service for NFV orchestration, has added support for additional Kubernetes objects and VNF LCM APIs and has created an additional way to read Kubernetes object files and CNF definitions from artifacts provided in the CSAR package. In addition, Tacker has implemented ETSI NFV-SOL standard features (life-cycle management, scaling, VNF operation, etc.) and added a Fenix plugin for rolling updates for VNFs with Fenix and Heat.
- Ironic – a bare metal provisioning environment, had a 66% increase in contributions compared to the OpenStack Ussuri cycle. It introduced better support for standalone usage in Kubernetes or edge environments, through decomposition of the various deployment steps and features like provisioning without BMC credentials or DHCP-less deployments.
More support for diverse architectures and standards
- The Cyborg API now supports a PATCH call allowing the direct programming of FPGAs using pre-uploaded bitstreams. The Victoria release also added support for Intel QAT and Inspur FPGA accelerators.
- Vitrage added support for loading data using the TMF639 standard Resource Inventory Management API.
- Octavia now supports HTTP/2 over TLS using Application Layer Protocol Negotiation (ALPN), as well as allows specifying minimum TLS versions accepted for listeners and pools.
Solutions for complex networking issues
- Neutron now provides metadata service over IPv6. Users can now use metadata service without config drive in IPv6-only networks. Neutron has also added support for flat networks for Distributed Virtual Routers (DVR), Floating IP port forwarding for the OVN backend, and router availability zones in OVN.
- Octavia load balancer pools now support version two of the PROXY protocol. This allows passing client information to member servers when using TCP protocols. PROXYV2 improves the performance of establishing new connections using the PROXY protocol to member servers, especially when the listener is using IPv6.
- Kuryr has added support for autodetection of VM bridging interface in nested setups.
“This release comes ten years after the initial OpenStack release,” said Thierry Carrez, VP of engineering at the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF). “Ten years in, OpenStack remains at the heart of open infrastructure, giving everyone access to open infrastructure-providing technologies, allowing unlimited, permissionless innovation in that space, and enabling completely new use cases. In the Victoria release it is great to see the result of increased involvement of OpenStack users in development work on supporting new use cases. Additionally, users are actively participating in filling feature gaps in the platform, increasing stability and facilitating day-two operations.”
