Train, 20th Version of Open Source Cloud Infrastructure Software From OpenStack Community

The OpenStack community released Train, the 20th version of the open source cloud infrastructure software.

The software powers more than 75 public cloud data centers and thousands of private clouds at a scale of more than 10 million compute cores. OpenStack is the one infrastructure platform suited to deployments of diverse architectures-bare metal, VMs, graphics processing units (GPUs) and containers.

“OpenStack is the market’s leading choice of open-source infrastructure for containers, VMs and bare metal in private cloud,” said Mark Collier, COO, OpenStack Foundation. “Looking forward to 2022, mark,watchers like 451 Research see an emerging $7.7 billion market for OpenStack products and services and $4.3 billion for application containers. As the overall open source cloud market continues its march toward eight figures in revenue and beyond, it’s clear that the OpenStack and application container markets are advancing hand in hand.“

For the Train release, OpenStack received 25,500 code changes by 1,125 developers from 150 different companies. The Foundation is supported by a large, global open source community and is one of the top three open source projects in the world in terms of active contributions, along with the Linux kernel and Chromium.

Among the dozens of enhancements provided in Train, 3 highlights are:

• Enhanced security and data protection

• Advancements for AI and ML use cases

• Improved resource management and tracking

Enhanced security and data protection:

• Support for building software RAID: Ironic bare metal service protects services from disk failures.

• Hardware-based encryption: Nova features a new framework supporting hardware-based encryption of guest memory to protect users vs. attackers or rogue administrators snooping on their workloads when using the libvirt compute driver. This feature is useful for multi-tenant environments and environments with publicly accessible hardware.

• Data protection orchestration: Karbor adds events notifications for plan, checkpoint, restore, scheduled and trigger operations. This feature allows users to backup image boot servers with the new added data which is located on the root disk. Upstream development was led by China Mobile.

Increased Accelerator support for AI/ML:

• Accelerator lifecycle management: In the Cyborg project, the Cyborg-Nova interaction spec creates a blueprint for launching and managing VMs with accelerators.

Improved resource management and tracking

• Train release completes the transition of the Placement capability into a standalone service, available independent of Nova. In Train, service response time is 0.7s down from 16.9s prior to the Stein release.

• Nova features improvements to the scheduler to more intelligently filter results from the Placement service.

• Watcher receives data from Placement, improving the Watcher compute data model.

Additional release highlights:

• Enhanced HA: Several Cinder drivers add support for features like multi-attach and consistency groups.

• Nova: Nova offers live migration support for servers with a NUMA topology, pinned CPUs and/or huge pages, when using the libvirt compute driver. It also delivers live migration support for servers with SR-IOV ports attached when using the libvirt compute driver. This enhancement, driven by the StarlingX project, enables a hypervisor to run both pinned and unpinned workloads in the same hypervisor.

• Documentation: Improved documentation was a community-wide goal for the Train cycle in an effort to be a more accessible open source community. OpenStack operators can access PDF-generated documentation by project.

“Led by users operating at scale, contemporary versions of OpenStack are refining the experience and extending the capabilities of the software to an impressive degree,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director, OpenStack Foundation. “With the Train release, the community has delivered features targeting emerging use cases like AI and ML while improving data security and infrastructure resource management for enterprises.“

Train already in production on launch day VEXXhost, Inc., a Canadian cloud service provider, uses OpenStack to power its public cloud and hosted private cloud deployments. The company employs a rapid-deployment cycle that tracks and tests vs. the latest stable branch of each software release. As a result, today VEXXhost is running the Train release in production via its private cloud deployments, targeting its public cloud datacenters next.

Mohammed Naser, CEO, VEXXhost, said: “With this new release out, we are excited to be able to offer the latest OpenStack has to offer on the first day. Pushing out new capabilities and features this quickly is something that our users have come to expect and very much enjoy. As we’ve done on other recent releases, we’re thrilled to deliver that once again with Train.“

Upcoming OpenStack ‘Open Infrastructure’ summit
Learn more about Train at the upcoming Open Infrastructure Summit (formerly the OpenStack Summit) to be held in Shanghai, China, November 4-6. Attendees from more than 50 countries and 40+ open source projects will gather and interact with speakers from organizations, driving innovation in open infrastructure. Critical application focus areas for the Summit include edge computing, continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD), AI (AI), NFV and container infrastructure, as well as public, private and hybrid cloud strategies.

Browse the Open Infrastructure Summit event agenda and sessions, including new projects hosted at the OpenStack Foundation: Airship, Kata Containers, StarlingX and Zuul.