The OpenStack Foundation announces the 18th release of its open source cloud infrastructure software-- Rocky, promising enhancements on the bare metal provisioning front, together with improved automation and usability on a variety of architectures.
On the upgrade front, OpenStack highlights refinements to the Ironic bare metal provisioning service. Ironic promises to bring more sophisticated management and automation capabilities to bare metal infrastructure, with user-managed BIOS settings (allowing users to gain performance, configure power management options, or enable technologies like SR-IOV or DPDK) and the addition of conductor groups, a means to isolate nodes based on physical location, reducing network hops for increased security and performance.
A new RAM disk deployment interface allows for fully ephemeral instances in large-scale and high performance computing (HPC) use cases, while a Nova driver brings about multi tenancy capabilities.
Further Rocky features include Cyborg (provides lifecycle management for accelerators such as GPUs, FPGA, DPDK and SSDs), Qinling (a function-as-a-service project adding serverless capabilities on top of OpenStack clouds), Masakari (provides automatic failure recovery), Octavia (a load balancing project with UDP support) and Magnum (makes container orchestration engine and their resources a first-class resources in OpenStack).
The upgrade process is also easier in Rocky thanks to Fast Forward Upgrade (FFU)-- a feature from the TripleO project allowing operators to advance more than one Openstack update at a time, making life easier for the operators of large clouds.