OpenStack Foundation released the 18th version of its cloud infrastructure platform, called OpenStack Rocky. The latest version comes with several new capabilities for operators of both private and public clouds.
The OpenStack software is used by over 75 public cloud datacenters and thousands of private clouds globally at a scale of more than 10 million compute cores. The platform can uniquely suit the deployments of various hardware architectures including bare metal, virtual machines (VMs), graphics processing units (GPUs) and containers.
Rocky version of OpenStack is a major release that brings enhancements to the OpenStack Ironic project, support for serverless functionality, and updates for enterprises to easily migrate to newer versions of OpenStack.
It incorporates improvements that will make OpenStack a more compatible platform for modern technologies like edge computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and software containers.
Enterprises nowadays are shifting beyond virtualization and deploying containers directly on bare metal to support modern technologies. OpenStack Ironic helps in laying the foundation for such hybrid environments.
Ironic now comes with more sophisticated management and automation capabilities for bare metal infrastructure. It will enable user-managed BIOS (basic input output system) settings to offer multiple configuration options. It will boost the performance, configure power management options, and enable technologies like SR-IOV or DPDK.
The RAM Disk deployment interface brings diskless deployments to Ironic which will eliminate the need for persistent storage. It will be specifically useful for enterprises with large-scale and high-performance computing (HPC) use cases.
Another new feature for OpenStack Ironic is the conductor_group property which will allow users to isolate the nodes based on physical location. It will reduce network hops for strong security and performance.
“OpenStack Ironic provides bare metal cloud services, bringing the automation and speed of provisioning normally associated with virtual machines to physical servers,” said Julia Kreger, principal software engineer at Red Hat and OpenStack Ironic project team lead.
“This powerful foundation lets you run VMs and containers in one infrastructure platform, and that’s what operators are looking for.”
With the latest version of OpenStack software, the Magnum project has become a Certified Kubernetes installer. Octavia load balancing project will now support UDP transport layer for voice, video and other real-time applications. It will bring load balancing to edge and IoT use cases.
Furthermore, the update will expand the monitoring capabilities of Masakari project to include internal failures in instances like hung operating system, data corruption, etc.
The capabilities of OpenStack Rocky are available via a new Silicon Valley public cloud availability zone powered by Canada-based provider, VEXXHOST.