The OpenStack community released 2024.2 Dalmatian, the
30th version of the world's most widely deployed open source cloud
infrastructure software. Around 500 contributors from organizations including
Red Hat, Cleura, Mirantis, Walmart, BBC R&D, Blizzard Entertainment, and
NVIDIA built Dalmatian, delivering support for AI workloads, enhanced security,
and improved user experiences among widespread maintenance updates. This
release comes as the OpenStack market is estimated at $22.81 billion
in 2024 and is expected to reach US$91.44 billion by 2029, growing at a
CAGR of 32%.
OpenStack is currently experiencing a
significant surge in adoption, attributed largely to the software's popularity as a VMware alternative and its
unique suitability for supporting artificial intelligence (AI), machine
learning (ML) and other high performance computing (HPC) workloads. Another
driver of OpenStack adoption is its integration with Linux and Kubernetes in
the "Open Infrastructure Blueprint," which empowers users to deploy container-based, virtual machine-based, and bare
metal-based workloads in the same infrastructure.
With more than 45 million cores in production, OpenStack is embraced by
thousands of users of all sizes and across industries, including many "mega-users" running a million cores or more.
"The upgrades, new features and maintenance work delivered in
the Dalmatian release demonstrate a hallmark of the OpenStack community: its
commitment to collaborating globally to address evolving technology needs," said
Thierry Carrez, general manager of the OpenInfra Foundation. "Also
reflected in the Dalmatian release is the community's determination to
integrate with a wide variety of open-source tools and platforms as well as
cutting-edge hardware. We want to thank all of the organizations and individuals
who actively use and contribute to OpenStack, especially the 487
contributors who submitted 7,640 changes over the past 6 months to keep
OpenStack powering advancement and innovation all over the world."
Skyline Now Available as Production-Ready, Next Generation
Dashboard
In
Dalmatian, Skyline and its modernized web UI are now fully supported as part of
the official OpenStack release. Previously released as a technology preview,
Skyline is now production ready and has added new functionality in Dalmatian
including support for Masakari, Designate and FWaaS, as well as several
translations.
This
milestone comes as the global ecosystem is eyeing Skyline as their dashboard of
choice to provide an improved end user experience. In August 2024, Rackspace
announced their newest service, Rackspace OpenStack Enterprise, which
includes Skyline as the dashboard instead of Horizon.
"At
Rackspace, we are all about simplifying the management of cloud systems.
OpenStack Skyline, with its intuitive and user-friendly interface, simplifies
the complex task of managing cloud services. It creates beautiful
administrative experiences allowing users to manage services at scale, with
ease and efficiency," said Kevin Carter, product director at Rackspace.
"When we
set out to create our new OpenStack product offerings, we were driven by the
need to enhance the administrator experience and showcase OpenStack's
strengths. With its responsive design and user-friendly interface, Skyline
significantly reduced navigation time, presented information in more
human-readable formats, and created a modern, cutting-edge experience when
consuming cloud resources. For organizations leveraging OpenStack, like us,
Skyline was the clear choice for the future. The Skyline development team has
created an incredible cloud interface with top-tier performance and efficiency.
We're excited about Skylines official release, the positive impact it will have
on our customers' OpenStack experience, and looking forward to contributing to
its future success."
Support of AI & HPC Workloads
Dalmatian advances OpenStack's support of AI and HPC workloads.
For example:
- Blazar introduced support for reserving
compute instances based on existing Nova flavors. This can be used to
provide reservation of GPU instances.
- In Nova, with the libvirt driver and libvirt version
7.3.0 or newer, mediated devices for vGPUs are now persisted across
reboots of a compute host. This offers more convenience and efficiency
improvements for users of hardware accelerators, many of whom currently
may be training AI systems.
Security
Security enhancements are a common theme in many OpenStack
Dalmatian components. Highlights include the following:
- Ironic has enhanced
multiple security aspects. For example, it now requires rescue passwords
to be hashed, it has reduced the logged nodes information during the
cleaning phase to avoid showing sensitive data, and it has hardened the
communication between the Ironic services and the Ironic agent requiring
an HTTPS URL by default. In addition, Ironic now allows users to perform
firmware updates on active nodes with the firmware interface, using the
redfish driver firmware update feature as a service step. This can be used
to facilitate applying firmware security patches.
- Neutron has added manager
role support to its APIs, meeting the next phase of the Secure RBAC
community goals.
- Nova now automatically
detects virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) support for compute
services if libvirt version is above 8.0.0 and if swtpm is installed on
the node. It will also automatically get the TPM models that are
supported. In addition, Nova users can now require Transport Layer
Security (TLS) connections for SPICE consoles.
User Interface Enhancements
OpenStack Dalmatian showcases several ways the community continues
to adapt the software to enhance usability. These features are key for
organizations who are migrating from VMware to OpenStack.
For example:
- Ironic has added runbooks, a new API concept to
enable self-service of maintenance items on nodes by project members.
Runbooks are curated lists of steps that can be run on nodes only
associated via traits and used in lieu of an explicit list of steps for
manual cleaning or servicing. They also follow RBAC rules, allowing
projects to limit who can maintain and use a runbook.
- Manila: Users now have the ability to manipulate
storage capabilities through shared metadata. Cloud operators can
determine which capabilities are updatable, and users are then notified
about the status of the updates through asynchronous user messages.
Simplification of OpenStack Upgrades
In 2022, the OpenStack community adopted a once-a-year SLURP release cadence designed
to ease the demands upon operators to upgrade every six months. OpenStack
Dalmatian is a "not-SLURP release," which means it is offered in the six-month
interim of annual SLURP releases expressly for those who wish to upgrade more
frequently.
***The OpenStack Dalmatian release is
available for download.***
***For a more detailed list of Dalmatian
release features, please see the release highlights.**