The latest version of the OpenStack infrastructure platform sees release-- "Stein," featuring updates to container functionality, edge computing and networking upgrades, as well as tighter integration with the Kubernetes container orchestration platform.
The 19th release of the OpenStack platform since its 2010 launch by NASA and Rackspace, Stein follows on the 18th "Rocky" milestone. It is the result of a collaboration involving multiple vendors, including the likes of Canonical/Ubuntu, SUSE, VMware and Red Hat. Technically it is not a single piece of software, but a framework bringing together an integration engine and nearly 50 interdependent modules, each serving a specific function.
One such module is Magnum, the certified Kubernetes installer. The update has it launch clusters faster than previous iterations (down from 10-12 minutes per node to 5 minutes), thanks to work by a team at CERN, the European physics laboratory. Another module, the clustering service Senlin, gets improvements from gaming giant Blizzard allowing APIs in the service to issue synchronous failures in case of problems with clusters or nodes, cool-downs or conflicts at the service level.
One module gets a replacement-- the Nova compute service is now Placement, a REST API stack and data model promising to simplify the specification of hosts for workload migration. Meanwhile Neutron, one of the oldest OpenStack modules, receives features to improve container operations, such as faster bulk port creation and an API extension for dynamic segment type range management.
The OpenStack Organisation will be telling more about Stein at the upcoming Open Infrastructure Summit (formerly the OpenStack Summit). As for the next version of OpenStack, it is dubbed "Train" and should be available on October 2019.
