Server NewsWhat's Coming in OpenStack Rocky?

What’s Coming in OpenStack Rocky?

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VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The OpenStack Rocky release is currently scheduled to become generally available on August 30th, and it’s expected to add a host of new and enhanced capabilities to the open-source cloud platform.

At the OpenStack Summit here, Anne Bertucio, marketing manager at the OpenStack Foundation, and Pete Chadwick, director of product management at SUSE, outlined some of the features currently on the Rocky roadmap.

Bertucio began the session by warning the audience that the roadmap is not prescriptive, but rather is intended to provide a general idea of the direction the next OpenStack release is taking.

New Features in OpenStack Rocky

Among the big high-level changes coming to Rocky as a community-wide goal is the ability to modify configuration options without a service restart. It’s a goal Bertucio referred to as enabling “mutable” configuration across projects.

Another goal is to introduce community-wide support for Python 3.5 across OpenStack projects. Bertucio noted Python 2.7 is set to hit its end of life in 2020, and the OpenStack community is preparing for that future.

The OpenStack Magnum project, which enables users to run Kubernetes container pods, is set to benefit from new cluster-healing capabilities in the Rocky release. Bertucio said the new feature will provide feedback if a cluster becomes inaccessible or unresponsive.

Serverless Capabilities in Store for Rocky

There are multiple enhancements on the OpenStack Rocky roadmap that will help to enable serverless, or functions-as-a-service, capabilities.

The Zun container project is set to become a virtual kubelet provider for OpenStack. With this feature Kubernetes users will be able to get pods and containers on OpenStack without pre-provisioning virtual machines.

A new project set to debut during the Rocky release cycle is the Qinling 1.0.0 project. Bertucio said Qinling provides Functions-as-a-Serive on top of OpenStack clouds.

High-Availability

Chadwick said the OpenStack Blazer resource reservation service is set to be enhanced in Rocky to enable operators to specify availability zones (AZ) in reservations. The Rocky enhancements will expand Blazar’s awareness of availability zones to support multiple AZS and let users specify an AZ at reservation time.

Another expected Rocky enhancement is expanded virtual GPU (vGPU) support, which will provide operators with the ability to specify a minimum bandwidth allocation for specific functionality.

Chadwick also noted the Masakari project for stateful services in OpenStack is set to gain introspective instance monitoring during the Rocky release.

Finally, from a security perspective, Chadwick said the OpenStack Cyborg project will gain new quota limits for hardware acclerators. He noted that the goal of having the limits is to help prevent DDoS attacks and unusual behaviors.

The OpenStack Rocky release is still under active development.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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