OpenStack Pike is the 16th release of the popular open source infrastructure software for building private and public clouds. This version had a focus on composable infrastructure services, manageability, and scalability.
The term composable infrastructure might be new to some folks, essentially it means pooling resources such as compute, storage and network. Providing those pools as services which can be consumed through policies/profiles or API’s which then basically composes the infrastructure. This can also be thought of as infrastructure as code.
Rolling upgrades make for easier upgrades
In terms of upgrades to your OpenStack environment, struggles always centered around how hard OpenStack was to deploy and update, and this release is certainly changing that perception. Rolling upgrades across more projects and focus on lifecycle management tools like OpenStack Kolla (For container deployment) will help make the life of a cloud architect much easier.
One of the cool things about OpenStack is the modularity, which enables you to pick the capabilities you need—whether it’s bare metal or block storage provisioning—to plug into your infrastructure stack.
Here are some highlights from the Pike release:
- Ironic: Rolling upgrade support: Ironic joins Cinder, Neutron, Nova, and Swift as projects that let operators roll out new code to the service without having to restart, minimizing downtime.
- Nova Cells v2: The Nova Cells architecture supports large deployments and scaling the compute service. Version 2 allows operators to shard their deployments to help with scaling the database and message queue, as well as segregate failure domains and help eliminate single points of failure.
- Standalone Cinder: Cinder can now act as a standalone storage service for vms, bare metal (via Ironic cross-project work), or containers using Docker or Kubernetes.
- Enhanced Ironic and Neutron integration: Through enhanced Ironic and Neutron integration, a bare metal server can plug into an existing Neutron framework for a consistent networking approach that offers true multi-tenant capabilities.
- Python 3.5 upgrade: Working across all projects, the community introduced support for Python 3.5 to be ready for Python 2.x end-of-life in 2020 and also to take advantage of new features and increased performance in the future.
Download OpenStack Pike and give it a go. If you have experience with OpenStack, let me know your thoughts on the latest release or if you have general thoughts on OpenStack, let’s discuss on Twitter and as always thanks for reading!