OpenStack, which now powers more than 75 public cloud data centers and thousands of private clouds at a scale of more than 10 million compute cores, has now advanced to its 18th major release.
OpenStack “Rocky” has dozens of dozens of enhancements, the significant being refinements to Ironic (the bare metal provisioning service) and fast forward upgrades. There are also several emerging projects and features designed to meet new user requirements for hardware accelerators, high availability configurations, serverless capabilities, and edge and internet of things (IoT) use cases.
OpenStack bare metal clouds, powered by Ironic, enable both VMs and containers to support emerging use cases like edge computing, network functions virtualization (NFV) and artificial intelligence (AI) /machine learning.
New Ironic features in Rocky include:
- User-managed BIOS settings—BIOS (basic input output system) performs hardware initialization and has many configuration options that support a variety of use cases when customized. Options can help users gain performance, configure power management options, or enable technologies like SR-IOV or DPDK. Ironic now lets users manage BIOS settings, supporting use cases like NFV and giving users more flexibility.
- Conductor groups—In Ironic, the “conductor” is what uses drivers to execute operations on the hardware. Ironic has introduced the “conductor_group” property, which can be used to restrict what nodes a particular conductor (or conductors) have control over. This allows users to isolate nodes based on physical location, reducing network hops for increased security and performance.
- RAM Disk deployment interface—A new interface in Ironic for diskless deployments. This is seen in large-scale and high performance computing (HPC) use cases when operators desire fully ephemeral instances for rapidly standing up a large-scale environment.
“OpenStack Ironic provides bare metal cloud services, bringing the automation and speed of provisioning normally associated with virtual machines to physical servers,” said Julia Kreger, principal software engineer at Red Hat and OpenStack Ironic project team lead. “This powerful foundation lets you run VMs and containers in one infrastructure platform, and that’s what operators are looking for.”
“At Oath, OpenStack manages hundreds of thousands of bare metal compute resources in our data centers. We have made significant changes to our supply chain process using OpenStack, fulfilling common bare metal quota requests within minutes,” said James Penick, IaaS Architect at Oath.