OpenStack Epoxy

OpenStack’s 31st release, Epoxy, is here and it arrives at an interesting time for organizations seeking open infrastructure alternatives, especially in light of the growing demand for cost-effective VMware migrations and AI-ready compute environments. This release is more than just a set of technical upgrades. It reflects the direction of the open source infrastructure community: pragmatic, performance-oriented, and increasingly tailored to modern enterprise challenges.

Smoother transitions from VMware

For many IT teams, migrating away from VMware has gone from a long-term consideration to a short-term necessity. OpenStack Epoxy delivers features designed to ease this transition. A key part of this is tightened integration between OpenStack Watcher and Prometheus, enabling real-time observability that’s critical during complex infrastructure migrations. This allows operators to make data-driven decisions when balancing workloads or moving VMs.

Epoxy also enhances block storage integration by expanding Cinder drivers to support storage backends from NetApp, Pure Storage, and Hitachi. For organizations standardizing their storage layer, this added flexibility means they can transition without compromising on performance or vendor preference.

GPU acceleration for AI workloads

The rise of AI and machine learning has reshaped infrastructure requirements, with GPU acceleration moving from a “nice-to-have” to a necessity. Epoxy introduces vfio-PCI variant driver support in Nova, which enables direct GPU passthrough to VMs. Specifically, this allows NVIDIA GRID GPUs to be used with minimal overhead, a good enhancement for developers and data scientists running resource-intensive workloads. Combined with upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS support, this means organizations can build future-ready environments optimized for both training and inference workloads.

Bare metal without the middleman

Bare metal provisioning has long been one of OpenStack’s strengths, and Epoxy strengthens that position with updates to Ironic, the bare metal service. New capabilities include the ability to deploy bootable container images directly to physical hosts, streamlining the provisioning process and reducing operational complexity. This is especially relevant in edge computing scenarios, where containers on bare metal are often preferred for their performance and simplicity.

Better load balancing and network control

Another under-the-radar but powerful improvement comes via Octavia, OpenStack’s load balancer service. Epoxy allows operators to assign custom Neutron security groups to load balancer VIP ports, giving them more granular control over network security. This change may seem minor, but it reflects OpenStack’s evolution into a fully mature IaaS platform, where small improvements in network isolation can lead to big gains in operational confidence.

The big picture

With Epoxy, OpenStack continues to show that it’s not just keeping pace with cloud infrastructure trends, it’s actively shaping them. Whether you’re looking to transition from VMware, run AI workloads on GPUs, or streamline your edge deployments, Epoxy brings powerful tools to the table.

For organizations invested in open source, vendor-neutral cloud infrastructure, this release is a reminder of what the community can achieve together. At Fairbanks, we’re excited about what Epoxy enables and how it fits into long-term cloud strategies for open source cloud infrastructure users and companies who are thinking about migrating towards this cutting-edge open source cloud platform. As always, we’re here to help you evaluate, deploy, and optimize OpenStack environments tailored to your goals.