OpenStack Ussuri Delivers Automation for Intelligent Open Infrastructure

OpenStack Ussuri Delivers Automation for Intelligent Open Infrastructure

OpenStack Ussuri Delivers Open Infrastructure Automation

Since its first inception in 2010, OpenStack has released major updates for their infrastructure every 6 months. Rather than going by version number, they use the alphabet to identify these releases. It started with Austin as the first release and now we have arrived at Ussuri, the 21st release of OpenStack. Currently, the Stein and Train releases – the 19th and 20th releases of OpenStack – are most used in a large OpenStack production environments. These releases enhance bare metal- and network management, while at the same time strengthening container functionalities for Kubernetes users and extending security and data protection. We see that Stein and Train are rock solid cloud infrastructures used for virtual machine-, container-, and bare metal performance at a massive scale.

 

The most recent release Ussuri includes improvements in core functionality, automation, cross-cell cold migration, containerized applications and support for new use cases at multiple levels in the stack.

 

From the many enhancements provided in the new OpenStack Ussuri release, I want to highlight three aspects in this article:

  • The ongoing improvements to the reliability of the core infrastructure layer.
  • The enhancements in relation to security- and encryption capabilities.
  • The extended versatility to deliver support for new and emerging use cases.
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Ongoing improvements to the reliability of the core infrastructure layer

 

With each new OpenStack release, we see that the core infrastructure layer is improved even further, as with every new OpenStack release, the reliability of the core infrastructure layer has the most priority. This applies to the Ussuri release also: For the latest release called ‘Ussuri’, OpenStack included over 24,000 code changes by more than 1,000 developers from 188 different organizations from over 50 countries. OpenStack is supported by a global open source community and at this pace, it continues to be one of the top three open source projects in the world in terms of active contributions, alongside the Linux kernel and the Chromium project.

 

Enhancements to security and encryption capabilities

 

Besides the ongoing improvements in regards to the reliability of the core infrastructure layer, also enhancements to the security- and encryption capabilities have been added. We see Nova (Compute Service) added support for cold migration and resizing servers between Nova cells. Also, support for IPv6 was added. This is actually the bridge between OpenStack and the container networking. Another enhancement is that the bare metal provisioning part of OpenStack added support for a hardware retirement workflow, to enable automation decommission in managed clouds.

 

Extended versatility to deliver support for new and emerging use cases

 

Octavia (OpenStack Network Load Balancing) added support for deploying load balancers in specific availability zones, which enables the deployment of load balancing capabilities to edge environments.

 

Along with the Kubernetes version upgrade support, Magnum (Container Infrastructure Management Service) added the support to upgrade the operating system of Kubernetes clusters, including master- and worker nodes.

 

So, again in this new OpenStack release, the Cloud infrastructure has been further improved and extended with new features. OpenStack still is the most extensive and reliable private cloud infrastructure solution available today. With features further extended, it is more suitable for more and more use cases.

 

If you would like support with this new release and how to stay up to date without affecting your services, let us know. Check out the ways we can help you in our post of February 2019: Choose your OpenStack Service Model. We are more than happy to help you.

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