OpenStack has revealed the general availability of its 18th iteration - OpenStack Rocky.
The updated open cloud platform adds two new major functionalities to the platform - faster upgrades and enhanced support for bare metal infrastructure with OpenStack Ironic.
Fast forward upgrades mean the software can be upgraded while offline, managing the upgrade process for all versions of OpenStack from the originating version to the iteration you want to move to.
An update to Ironic, OpenStack's bare metal service is the biggest update though. It allows for the production of an OpenStack environment and the associated libraries to manage and provision physical machines in exactly the same way OpenStack can be used with virtual machines.
"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."
Key features in Ironic include user-managed BIOS settings, conductor groups that can be used to restrict which nodes a conductor has control over and RAM disk deployment service for high-performance computing environments.
"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.
"We're looking forward to deploying the Rocky release to take advantage of its numerous enhancements such as BIOS management, which will further streamline how we maintain, manage and deploy our infrastructure."
On top of these two major refinements, OpenStack has developed an array of smaller tweaks in its platform, including features to tag-on support for hardware accelerators, high availability configurations, serverless capabilities, and new functionalities for edge and the internet of things (IoT) implementations.
