Mohammed NaserLike all the times before, OpenStack's latest release, Ussuri is here with some exciting new features to enhance your cloud infrastructure experience.
OpenStack has pioneered the concept of open infrastructure since 2010. It achieves this with new releases two times a year, giving users the best of services and experience. With over 24,000 code changes by over 1,000 developers from across over 50 countries and 188 organizations, the 21st OpenStack release, Ussuri, is here.
VEXXHOST couldn't be more excited to be among the contributors of OpenStack Ussuri. Working with the community is always a pleasure. It is even more so when our efforts realize in the form of new features and improvements.
Ussuri updates bring about changes in two significant areas, the core infrastructure layer and security and encryption, along with plenty of other exciting features serving their use cases.
Reliability of the Core Infrastructure Layer
Nova - is the compute service. It added support for cold migration and resizing support. Live cross cell migration is not supported yet. But, the magic of an open source community is that it can contributions can be made for it. A big new addition is API policy introducing new default roles with scope_type capabilities. This new change enhances security and manageability by being richer at accessing projects at both system and project level.
Ironic - the bare metal provisioning, has added support for hardware retirement workflow to enable automation of hardware decommission in managed clouds.
Kuryr - the networking bridge, added support for IPv6 and improves policy support.
Security and Encryption Enhancement
Octavia - the load balancing service. It allows you to specify the Transport Layer Security (TLS) ciphers acceptable for listeners and pools. This feature gets load balancers to enforce security compliance requirements. Another awaited update that became a part of Ussuri is the support for deployment in specific availability zones, allowing the deployment of load balancing capabilities to edge environments. An interesting thing that took place during these contributions was the mentorship of college students to get them familiarized with OpenStack. The learning by doing experience is very conducive to growing minds!
Neutron - the networking service, brings about several security improvements with this release. Support for stateless security groups to Role Based Access Control (RBAC) for address scopes and subnet pools are some significant improvements.
Other Important Features
The series of advancements in the new update continues and here are some other essential features that are a part of the 21st release.
Cinder added support for Glance multistore. It also supports image data colocation when uploading a volume to the image service. The latest features also included some new backend drivers. The work for volume-local-cache has started and is said to continue in the next release, Victoria.
Swift adds a new system namespace for the service, a versioning API, and S3 versioning.
You can decompress images, import single image or copy existing images in multiple stores and delete images from single-store through improvements in Glance.
User experience is improved as you can be given concrete role assignments without relying on the mapping API through Keystone's additional features. You benefit most when using the federated authentication method.
A brand new feature of creating shares from snapshots across storage pools has been made available with Manilla.
Kolla is the containerized deployment service of OpenStack. This project has added initial support for TLS encryption of backend API services, providing end-to-end encryption of API traffic.
Magnum has added support in two areas. First, the Kubernetes version upgrade support. Second is the ability to upgrade the operating system of the Kubernetes cluster including master and worker nodes.
OpenStack Ussuri and VEXXHOST
“The extensive list of new features shows just how active the OpenStack community is and the VEXXHOST team is excited to be a part of such a progressive upstream community. As is expected of us, we are bringing the new release to our old and new clients as part of our OpenStack Upgrade Solution, and we hope for all OpenStack users to make the most of it", said Mohammed Naser, CEO of VEXXHOST.
Come and upgrade to OpenStack Ussuri with us. VEXXHOST is here to guide you and consult with you in your OpenStack deployments every step of the way. Get a seamless experience while transitioning from an older release as our engineers will do the heavy lifting for you. Are you looking to make the most of the benefits that come with every release? Get in touch with our experts for more information on how we can help you get started on your OpenStack Upgrade journey.