The OpenStack Foundation, which has governed the development of its namesake open-source cloud infrastructure software since 2012, today released the 22nd round of updates to OpenStack and its component projects.

Dubbed Victoria, the new release includes more than 20,000 code changes by nearly 800 developers from 45 countries. Major enhancements include native integration with the Kubernetes orchestrator for software containers, support for numerous new architectures and standards and improved handing of complex networking issues such as metadata service delivery.

OpenStack, which turns 10 next week, is used by more than 75 public cloud data centers and thousands of private clouds, the foundation said. It’s a single infrastructure platform that can be deployed in bare-metal, virtual machine and container environments.

The Victoria release includes support for custom resource definitions in the Kuryr container integration module, which will no longer use annotations to store data about OpenStack objects in the Kubernetes application program interface. “Within the Kubernetes community there’s concept of custom resource definitions for connecting into Kubernetes services,” said Jonathan Bryce, the foundation’s executive director. “Kuryr has adopted this. This brings the two systems closer together using the native components on both sides.”

Tacker, a service used for network function virtualization orchestration, adds support for additional Kubernetes objects to let users build out environments that are a mix of virtual network functions and cloud-native network functions.

Neutron, which provides metadata services over a network, now works across IPv6-only networks, which are becoming increasingly common, Bryce said. “The IPv4 address space has been exhausted and we need to get more people to v6,” he said. Neutron has also added support for flat networks for distributed virtual routers, floating IP port forwarding for the open virtual network back end and router availability zones in OVN.

Ironic, a bare-metal provisioning environment, gets improved support for standalone usage in Kubernetes or edge environments through decomposition of the deployment steps and features such as provisioning without BMC Software Inc. credentials or deployments that don’t use Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. Ironic has seen a 66% jump in developer activity as a result of increasing adoption of edge networks, Bryce said. “This points to diversification in how people are building their environments,” he said.

Kata Containers gets 4,000 changes

The OpenStack Foundation also said version 2.0 of Kata Containers, is now shipping. It provides a way to isolate containerized workloads with security comparable to that of virtual machines. Version 2.0 features reduced sandboxing overhead, improved operability and debugging and cloud hypervisor support. Improvements to image handling is the works. The new release reflects almost 4,000 changes from 167 contributors and 26 organizations, the foundation said.

The upgraded Kata Containers also has improved performance and observability enhancements with metrics provided about the runtime, the virtual machine manager and the guest kernel delivered in Prometheus format. A new agent written in Rust reduces attack surface and overhead. Size has been reduced from 11 megabytes to 300 kilobytes.

“The reduction to 300K doesn’t sound like that much, but this is something you’re going to be running in thousands and thousands of environments,” Bryce said. He pointed to Ant Group Co. Ltd., which is running Kata Containers on more than 10,000 cores and thousands of nodes. The community is also developing features to allow users to pull container images inside a sandbox for advanced security and isolation as well as better input/output stream handling.

The foundation also released version 2.0 of Airship, a collection of loosely coupled but interoperable open-source tools that declaratively automate cloud provisioning of multiple open-source platforms. The projects is intended is to bring together multiple projects and create a single environment that combines bare metal, virtualization and containerized workloads with an automated management plane.

In addition to a smaller footprint and better performance, there’s Airship Control, a new feature for managing the environment. Airship is notable for introducing declarative configuration. “You would describe what you wanted the environment to look like in a manifest file and Airship would gather the services and hardware you wanted, but the initial setup of that manifest file could be tricky,” Bryce said. “You can now run commands directly rather than use a manifest file.”

A new user interface model reveals the declarative state Airship will contain. “You can say I want to run three virtualized servers, two Kubernetes pods, two more with Ceph storage to Kubernetes and make sure those are always up and running,” Bryce said. “You declare that in a manifest file and then Airship monitors the environment. If there’s a failure or a node becomes unavailable, it will restart those services or move them to another machine.”

Zuul, a gateway service that provides dynamic routing, monitoring, resiliency and security, will transition to a fully distributed, highly available model and add support for Ansible 2.9 automation and multi-architecture Docker image builds. Coming next is a distributed scheduler that will eliminate the current central scheduler, which has become a single point of failure.

The foundation also said Verizon has chosen the StarlingX edge infrastructure stack across its national 5G edge network in the U.S. “It’s an ultra-low-latency, high-availability, tier-one network, and it’s all built on StarlingX,” Bryce said.

Photo: OpenStack