OpenStack Ussuri release lands, delivering automation for intelligent open infrastructure

AUSTIN, Texas — May 13, 2020 — The OpenStack community today released Ussuri, the 21st version of the most widely deployed open source cloud infrastructure software. The release delivers advancements in three core areas:

• Ongoing improvements to the reliability of the core infrastructure layer
• Enhancements to security and encryption capabilities
• Extended versatility to deliver support for new and emerging use cases 

These improvements were designed and delivered by a global community of upstream developers and operators. OpenStack software now powers more than 75 public cloud data centers and thousands of private clouds at a scale of more than 10 million compute cores. OpenStack is the one infrastructure platform uniquely suited to deployments of diverse architectures—bare metal, virtual machines (VMs), graphics processing units (GPUs) and containers. 

For the Ussuri release, OpenStack received over 24,000 code changes by 1,003 developers from 188 different organizations and over 50 countries. OpenStack is supported by a large, global open source community and is one of the top three open source projects in the world in terms of active contributions, along with the Linux kernel and Chromium. 

***The OpenStack Ussuri  release will be available for download at 10am CDT on Wednesday, May 13, 2020. Follow the link to learn more about features and enhancements.*** 

OpenStack pioneered the concept of open infrastructure ten years ago. Since then, it has rapidly become the open infrastructure-as-a-service standard. Recently, new workload demands like AI, ML, edge 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. Intelligent open infrastructure—the integration of open source components that are evolving to meet these demands—creates an infrastructure that is self-monitoring, self-replicating, and delivering a versatile set of use cases. 

OpenStack has emerged as the preferred open source infrastructure choice for containers, VMs and bare metal in private cloud. The Ussuri release reinforces what OpenStack is well known for—namely, rock-solid virtual machine and bare metal performance at massive scale. At the same time, Ussuri delivers security improvements via Octavia and Kolla. And, it supports new and emerging use cases with improvements to projects like Zun. 

“OpenStack is embraced as an intelligent open infrastructure engine first and foremost because it works really well—it is simply the world’s most stable and reliable software for building clouds,” said Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation (OSF). “Furthermore, with the automation and sophistication consistently being added in each new release, OpenStack is enabling some of the world’s most progressive and groundbreaking work in telecommunications, medicine, banking, entertainment, high performance computing, government and more.” (Read OpenStack user stories.) 

Among the dozens of enhancements provided in Ussuri, the following upgrades demonstrate how this 21st release of OpenStack provides more sophisticated support to user needs at each layer of the infrastructure stack: 

• Cyborg (accelerator life cycle management) integration with Nova (compute service) has been completed. Users can now use Nova to launch server instances with accelerators managed by Cyborg. See accelerator operation guide to find which instance operations are supported.
• Ironic (bare metal service) has added support for a hardware retirement workflow to enable automation of hardware decommission in managed clouds.
• Kolla (containerized deployment of OpenStack) has added initial support for TLS encryption of backend API services, providing end-to-end encryption of API traffic. Currently Keystone is supported.
• Kuryr (bridge between OpenStack and container networking) has added support for IPv6.
• Nova (compute service) has added support for cold migrating and resizing servers between Nova cells.
• Octavia (load balancer service) has added support for deploying load balancers in specific availability zones, which enables the deployment of load balancing capabilities to edge environments. Also, Octavia users can now specify the TLS ciphers acceptable for listeners and pools, which allows load balancers to enforce security compliance requirements.
• Zun (containers service) has added support for Kubernetes CRI runtime. Zun uses CRI runtime to realize the concept of capsule (pod). As a result, Kubernetes can use Zun API to create pods including in secure Kata Containers. 

“Led by users operating at scale, OpenStack is deployed in every industry and on nearly every continent,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OSF. “The global community of users and developers who support OpenStack not only steadily improve the software’s core functionality but also drive innovation to support new and important use cases at all layers in the stack. With the Ussuri release, the community has delivered features that range from bare metal to edge applications and from automated server and accelerator deployment to security enhancements in load balancers and containers.”