Nee nieuwe release van het inmid­dels ruim 10 jaar oude OpenStack levert substan­tiële nieuwe mogelijk­heden door toene­mende vraag aar OpenStack, gedreven door AI-workloads en gebrui­kers die VMware-alter­na­tieven zoeken.

De OpenStack-commu­nity heeft vandaag de release aange­kon­digd van Caracal, de 29e versie van ’s werelds meest gebruikte open source cloud­in­fra­struc­tuur software. OpenStack wordt wereld­wijd toege­past door organi­sa­ties van verschil­lende groottes en industrieën die samen meer dan 45 miljoen cores in productie hebben. De laatste tijd is er steeds meer vraag naar OpenStack onder gebrui­kers die veelei­sende AI- en HPC- workloads hosten en door gebrui­kers die gevir­tu­a­li­seerde workloads op grote schaal willen uitrollen en tegelij­ker­tijd de vendor lock-in van merkge­bonden oplos­singen willen vermijden.

OpenStack stelt gebrui­kers in staat om de produc­ti­vi­teit te verbe­teren door support van AI- en HPC-workloads. Nova onder­steunt nu bijvoor­beeld vGPU live migra­ties, een grote winst voor hardware enable­ment en versnelde workloads. In Nova zijn ook bugs opgelost voor verbe­te­ring support NVIDIA GPU’s. OpenStack Caracal zorgt daarnaast voor verschil­lende verbe­te­ringen op het gebied van flexi­bi­li­teit en perfor­mance, evenals security.

Het volle­dige Engels­ta­lige persbe­richt is hieronder te lezen:

OpenStack Caracal Delivers Substan­tial New Capabi­li­ties as OpenStack Demand Skyroc­kets, Driven by AI Workloads and Users Seeking VMware Alternatives

OpenStack Caracal adds enhan­ce­ments for AI and HPC; improves agility, perfor­mance, and security; and incor­po­rates support for industry-best hardware and software.

The OpenStack commu­nity today released Caracal (‘keh·ruh·kal), the 29th version of the world’s most widely deployed open source cloud infra­struc­ture software. OpenStack is deployed globally by organi­za­tions compri­sing a multi­tude of sizes and industries, with more than 45 million cores in produc­tion. Recently, OpenStack has seen incre­a­sing demand among users who are hosting deman­ding artifi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) and high-perfor­mance compu­ting (HPC) workloads, as well as by users who want to run virtu­a­lized workloads at a massive scale while avoiding the vendor lock-in nature of proprietary solutions. 

OpenStack Caracal shares several features with its namesake African wildcat: the ability to make great leaps, agility and high perfor­mance, fierce protec­tion of its terri­tory, and adapta­bi­lity to new environments.

Support of AI & HPC Workloads 

OpenStack enables users to make great leaps in produc­ti­vity through its support of AI and HPC workloads. For example, Nova now supports vGPU live migra­tions, a big win for hardware enable­ment and accele­rated workloads. Within Nova, bugs were also fixed to improve NVIDIA GPU support. In addition, Ironic’s conti­nued transi­tion from manufac­turer-specific drivers to the Redfish API is helping promote open standards in hardware manage­ment while impro­ving maintai­na­bi­lity for its project.

Agility and Performance

OpenStack Caracal makes several impro­ve­ments in agility and perfor­mance, inclu­ding the following:

• Desig­nate now supports Catalog Zones (RFC 9432). This can improve the scala­bi­lity of Desig­nate pools managing a large number of zones and signi­fi­cantly reduce the provi­si­o­ning time when adding additi­onal DNS servers to a Desig­nate pool.
• Octavia Amphora-based load balan­cers now support using SR-IOV Virtual Functions (VF) for the load balancer VIP ports. This can signi­fi­cantly reduce latency for traffic flowing through the load balancer, delive­ring a notable impro­ve­ment for high-traffic and perfor­mance-sensi­tive deployments.
• With respect to user experience (UX), perfor­mance enhan­ce­ments in Caracal include upgrades in Ironic and Manila. Ironic will now reserve a small number of worker threads for user-inter­ac­tive API usage. Previously, an overlo­aded Ironic cluster could fail API calls if many nodes performed provi­si­o­ning actions at the same time. In Manila, users can now specify a custom export location for their shares, making mount paths predic­table. Also, shares created using the CEPHFS protocol in Manila will now feature the backing filesy­stem name in the share metadata, making it easier to mount shares.

Security

Security enhan­ce­ments are a common theme in many OpenStack Caracal compo­nents. Highlights include: 

• Role-based access control (RBAC) progress in services like Ironic, Keystone, Kolla, and Magnum reflect an ongoing OpenStack-wide goal to improve overall security and flexi­bi­lity of the platform.
• Horizon and all Horizon plugins now support the Node.js 20 version of Node.js. In addition, Horizon now uses Django 4.2 as default and has dropped Django 3.2 support.
• In Manila, admini­stra­tors are now able to confi­gure metadata options that can only be manipu­lated by more privi­leged users through a new config option.
• Nova console session timeouts are a security impro­ve­ment oft-requested by users. In Caracal, a new confi­gu­ra­tion option provides the ability to automa­ti­cally close a server console session when the token expires.

Continuous Adaptation

OpenStack Caracal showcases several ways the commu­nity conti­nues to adapt the software to stay up-to-date with the latest use-case trends and the best available hardware and software. For example: 

• As menti­oned above, Caracal includes the latest version support for Django and Node.js.
• Cloud­kitty has added support for two new storage backends — OpenSearch and InfluxDB. 
• OpenSearch log reten­tion has been enabled in Kolla.
• In Cinder, new driver features were added, notably, Fujitsu ETERNUS DX expand volume on RAID group, Pure Storage synchro­nous repli­ca­tion, NetApp iSCSI LUN space alloca­tion, and Dell PowerFlex Active-Active support.

“Currently, the big drivers of OpenStack demand are AI workloads and VMware users looking for alter­na­tive virtu­a­li­za­tion solutions, and the Caracal release includes impro­ve­ments that will help in both of those areas,” said Thierry Carrez, general manager of the OpenInfra Founda­tion. “For example, in Nova we see enable­ment of vGPU migra­tion, a critical feature to support AI and high-perfor­mance workloads, while in other compo­nents you’ll see several user experience impro­ve­ments that will make OpenStack more intui­tive to use for users new to cloud infra­struc­ture. Beyond that, you’ll see in Caracal that the OpenStack commu­nity is still very active in enhan­cing security, perfor­mance, relia­bi­lity, and addres­sing the type of house­kee­ping and QA work that conti­nues to make OpenStack the open source cloud platform of choice.” 

OpenStack Caracal kan hier worden gedownload.