OpenStack Resurgence: How VMware’s Licensing Rugpull is Encouraging a Second Look

 

June 18, 2025

In the wake of Broadcom’s 2023 acquisition of VMware, the enterprise IT world found itself at a crossroads. Rapid, unexpected changes to VMware’s licensing model sent shockwaves through thousands of organizations, forcing a stark choice: stay and absorb dramatic cost increases—or seek out an alternative platform capable of handling mission-critical workloads.

Enter OpenStack

For many organizations, OpenStack was that cloud they looked into 10 years ago and decided that it wasn’t the right platform for them at the time. Since then, thanks to thousands of contributors and hundreds of organizations, OpenStack has matured significantly into a stable platform trusted to handle any workload. It has simplified and addressed feedback from users. It has been adopted and evolved by thousands of developers at hundreds of organizations all around the globe. OpenStack has evolved to support complex, large-scale infrastructure with power and flexibility.

With a second look, organizations around the world are discovering just how much the OpenStack marketplace has grown in the last decade. There have been 21 releases since 2015 and with each one there have been numerous upgrades and advancements. These organizations have a lot of questions though; namely, how does a migration from VMware to OpenStack work? 

Available Today: A Comprehensive VMware-to-OpenStack Migration Guide

Last year, the OpenInfra Member community collaborated to create the VMware Migration Whitepaper to start a public dialogue positioning OpenStack as an option in this quest for a virtualization alternative. It helped educate this market on the why of the situation – why OpenStack could be a strategic, cost saving alternative. As a result, questions are now focused on the how.

Today, I am proud to introduce the VMware Migration Guide, which answers these questions. The idea behind the guide is to build on the foundation that last year’s white paper began. The Guide’s aim is to prime the organizations for making the move to OpenStack by helping with the planning stages, the candid assessment of the existing stack, and setting up a mindset for modernizing infrastructure and the operating model.  

The Guide was created by a group of OpenInfra community members with experience and knowledge in this space and includes:

  • Case Studies of real world workload migration
  • Reference architectures to show how an OpenStack cloud offering might be laid out and how that can serve the workload that is currently on VMware
  • Considerations, comparisons and the clear benefits of moving to OpenStack to avoid vendor lock-in and capitalize on all that comes with leveraging an open source solution 

How OpenStack Introduces Benefits of Open Source to a Previously Locked In Crowd

As organizations consider the move from a proprietary solution like VMware to an open source based product, the benefits are not limited to a reduction in licensing costs. The most impactful benefit is actually the dissolution of vendor lock-in; you are no longer bound to the decisions or product roadmap of a single vendor. The OpenStack Marketplace proves there is an entire ecosystem for you to explore and interoperability you can leverage until you find the right partner. 

Beyond the Marketplace, OpenStack is backed by a global community openly developing code that is better tested and more robust. Now is the time for your organization to take another look at OpenStack. Learn more about the benefits and challenges of VMware to OpenStack Migration and join this global movement.

Students of OpenStack: Meet Oria Weng!

 

June 2, 2025

Oria Weng is a third-year honors student studying computer science at Oregon State University, working at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL).

What Open Infrastructure project are you working with, and what made you interested in that project, as opposed to some of the other options? What was the hardest part about getting started?

I believe it was Kendall Nelson who connected the OSUOSL with the internship program; I joined work on OpenStack Client (python-openstackclient), the command line client, after Antonia Gaete, another past intern, had started working on it. It made sense logistically for us to work under the same mentors (Stephen Finucane and Artem Goncharov) and on the same project, but I did like specifically working on identity because things like users, projects, etc. were things I had to use pretty often in my own usage of OpenStack. Plus, it was a good opportunity to learn more about security concepts like authorization and authentication. Later, Artem introduced us to his API schema work on Keystone, the identity service, and invited us to help with that. I’ve really enjoyed working with APIs in the past, so this sounded like a fun opportunity. I especially liked the idea that enforcing a strict API schema could (potentially) make it easier to find inconsistencies and bugs, as well as improve the understandability and documentation of Keystone.

What was the hardest part about getting started?

This was my first time working on a big open-source project at this scale, so the hardest part for me was understanding how the codebase fit together and figuring out which of the moving parts I should change to accomplish something. What helped me the most was to look at examples of other changes – for example, I studied Antonia’s changes as I was starting out, since she had started at OpenStack earlier than me and was doing similar work. It also helped a lot to have mentors who knew the codebase inside and out and were willing to answer any questions that came up.

What could have made the getting-started process easier?

I think the docs were pretty overwhelming for me as I was starting out – each project has different categories of references and guides as well as multiple project versions; there are also both contributor guides for individual projects and ones for OpenStack overall. Fortunately, I had help from mentors like Kendall, Stephen, and Artem to figure things out, but I think a short guide for total beginners on how to navigate the projects and their docs would be helpful. 🙂

How have you contributed to the community?

For OpenStack, I’ve primarily been helping to migrate OpenStack Client commands to use the OpenStack SDK (to move away from keystoneclient) as well as adding API schema validators to Keystone. In terms of the open source community in general, this is my third year working at the OSUOSL, where we provide hosting and other services to over 160 open source projects. I think that’s pretty cool!

What’s the biggest benefit from your involvement? (hard or soft skills, connections, etc)

One of the biggest benefits for me was just getting used to development on a big open source project. Before going in, I didn’t really have a good idea of how open source development really worked; I learned a lot about best practices and how to communicate.

What advice do you have for students who want to get started with open source?

Don’t be afraid to ask questions! As I was starting out, I probably looked even sillier pretending I knew what was going on when I didn’t, than I would have if I’d just asked an “obvious” question.

Check out Oria Weng’s OpenStack contributions

Check out Oria Weng’s other projects on GitHub

Students of OpenStack: Meet Boosung Kim!

 

May 14, 2025

As the academic year wraps up, seniors at Dickinson College have completed their capstone course, where they learned a lot during the past year, including new concepts, how OpenInfra works, working with the Swift core team, and we getting to attend the Project Teams Gathering (PTG).

This year, James Nguyễn, Nathan Nguyễn, and Boosung Kim were among the fortunate few who had the chance to work with OpenStack. In a recent interview with one of the students, Boosung Kim shared insights into how he became acquainted with OpenStack, what surprised him the most, the challenges he encountered, and the advice he’d offer to future students.

Boosung is a senior double majoring in Computer Science and Math, graduating this year. He is currently wrapping up his final semester while contributing to OpenStack Swift. Outside of school, he enjoys attending hackathons and swimming!

What Open Infrastructure project are you working with and what made you interested in that project, as opposed to some of the other options?

I’m working with OpenStack Swift. I was drawn to it because of my interest in large-scale systems and backend infrastructure. Swift stood out from other projects due to its clean design, active community, and relevance to the kind of distributed systems I want to build professionally.

How did you get started? What was the hardest part?

I got started by joining Dickinson College’s seminar focused on open source development, where I chose Swift for a technical deep dive. I began by exploring the codebase, setting up a dev environment, and meeting the Swift team during the 2024 PTG.

The hardest part was grasping new concepts like race conditions, erasure coding, and heartbeats. These were outside the scope of my usual coursework, so it took extra time to understand how they fit into a distributed system like Swift.

What could have made the getting started process easier?

Clearer beginner-focused documentation on core concepts like consistency, replication, and concurrency in Swift would have helped. But the dev team was willing to hop on a call to explain these concepts in-depth, so everything worked out regardless.

How have you contributed to the community?

I’ve contributed code patches to the Swift project, participated in review discussions, and gave a tech talk at my college to introduce others to OpenStack and Swift. I hope that my contributions can be of help to Swift users and that more students from my college will work with OpenStack.

What’s the biggest benefit from your involvement? 

The biggest benefit has been learning how real-world distributed systems are built and maintained. I also gained experience navigating large codebases, writing production-level code, and communicating effectively in an open-source community.

What advice do you have for students who want to get started with open source?

Don’t try to perfect your patches before submitting for review like I did. Aim for quick, purposeful iterations so that you can get reviews fast and ship fast.

Want to connect with Boosung Kim? Find him on LinkedIn!

OpenStack at the April 2025 PTG: All Things ‘Epoxy’ & ‘Flamingo’

 

April 22, 2025

The OpenInfra Project Team Gathering took place April 7 to 11, earlier this month. A variety of OpenStack teams, covering the basic OpenStack services, pop up working groups, among other more horizontal view teams met to have technical discussions throughout the week. Discussions ranged from ongoing feature work, to reviewing feedback on the most recent Epoxy release, to planning for the future and everything in between. 

Some highlights were the revival of interest in Watcher which has been rejuvenated by a number of organizations looking to migrate from VMware and OpenStack being well poised as an alternative. The technical committee held a community leaders forum to bubble up issues affecting teams and reignite awareness about the Vulnerability Management Team and ongoing community goals. Also this PTG, OpenStack Operators and community members gathered to discuss how to better engage with people in operations roles and re-frame the way they collaborate as a group and participate in the larger community. 

For more information about discussions that went on at the PTG, you can find find a list of the team summaries that have been published below.

Thank you to everyone that participated in this PTG! If there are any summaries missing from this list, please reach out to [email protected] to get them added here. 

Tags:

OpenStack 2025.1 Epoxy: Strengthening OpenStack’s Position as a VMware Alternative and Enhancing Security and Hardware Enablement

 

April 2, 2025

The OpenStack community’s latest release, 2025.1 Epoxy, marks an important milestone in the project’s evolution. With the release of OpenStack Epoxy, the project continues to improve its capabilities, positioning itself as a more viable alternative to proprietary solutions like VMware. Packed with a range of new features, security enhancements, and hardware enablement improvements, Epoxy is poised to support more complex and demanding workloads while offering more efficient management tools for cloud administrators.

OpenStack’s adoption is on the rise, and this release demonstrates the community’s commitment to its growth and evolution in the face of industry trends and opportunities. The 31st release of OpenStack is the result of contributions from around 450 developers from leading organizations such as BBC R&D, Blizzard Entertainment, Canonical, Ericsson, Mirantis, NVIDIA, and others. Together, they’ve delivered more than 7,600 changes, including new features and significant maintenance updates. This release also comes as the OpenStack community celebrates its 15th anniversary, a testament to its continued relevance and importance in the cloud computing world.

Strengthening OpenStack’s Position as a VMware Alternative

Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and subsequent licensing changes have incentivized organizations around the world to re-evaluate their virtualization strategy. OpenStack has emerged as a leading VMware alternative, and the upstream community is evolving OpenStack to address this market opportunity. One of the standout features of OpenStack Epoxy is the enhanced VMware migration capabilities, especially through the integration of Prometheus within the Watcher project. Watcher is a component of OpenStack designed to optimize resource allocation. With the addition of a Prometheus data source, OpenStack can now more effectively monitor existing VMware infrastructures, making it easier to track performance and detect bottlenecks during migration. This feature is invaluable for businesses looking to migrate from VMware to OpenStack, as it ensures a smooth transition without performance degradation.

Additionally, Epoxy introduces improved support for a range of storage solutions through the Cinder project. Cinder, OpenStack’s block storage service, now includes updates for many supported hardware drivers, such as NetApp, Pure Storage, and Hitachi. These improvements help organizations that rely on specific storage solutions to migrate their workloads to OpenStack more easily. After migration, the compatibility between OpenStack and existing storage infrastructures ensures seamless data access, reducing the risks associated with switching to a new platform.

Enhancing Security Features

Security remains a top priority in the Epoxy release. A significant upgrade comes to Manila, OpenStack’s shared file system service. In Epoxy, Manila users can now modify the access level of share access rules, switching from “read-only” to “read-write” or vice versa. This gives administrators greater control over who can modify and access shared data, improving the overall security of the cloud environment by reducing the risk of unauthorized changes.

Additionally, Manila users can now set and modify share server characteristics through share network subnet metadata. This feature allows administrators to define permissible modifications through a configuration option called driver_updatable_subnet_metadata. The result is improved network isolation and segmentation, reducing the risk of lateral movement in case of a security breach. By ensuring that different data sets are isolated on separate subnets, the security of the network is significantly enhanced.

Another noteworthy security feature comes to Octavia, OpenStack’s load balancing service. In this release, Octavia now supports custom neutron security groups for load balancer VIP (Virtual IP) ports. By associating specific security groups with VIP ports, administrators can ensure that only approved traffic types are allowed to access the load balancer, further reducing the risk of unauthorized access.

Improving Hardware Enablement

OpenStack Epoxy also brings important hardware enablement updates, particularly in support of AI and machine learning workloads. One of the key improvements is the addition of a new interface in Ironic, OpenStack’s bare-metal provisioning service. This interface allows for the deployment of bootable container images directly to a host without intermediate steps, simplifying the deployment process for operators and users alike.

Another significant update comes in Nova, OpenStack’s compute service, with improvements to PCI passthrough. PCI passthrough allows virtual machines to access physical hardware devices directly, and the Epoxy release expands support for the vfio-PCI variant drivers, including Nvidia GRID on Ubuntu 24.04. This enhancement ensures that OpenStack can more effectively support AI workloads by allowing for the direct use of GPUs and other specialized hardware in virtualized environments. Additionally, this update enables live migration of instances using these PCI devices, further improving the flexibility and scalability of OpenStack environments.

Simplifying OpenStack Upgrades

The OpenStack community continues to focus on simplifying the upgrade process for users. The Skip Level Upgrade Release Process (SLURP), introduced in 2022, allows users to upgrade to the next major release every year rather than every six months. This release cycle simplifies the process for administrators, reducing the frequency of major updates while still delivering new features and security patches. The Epoxy release (2025.1) follows the previous SLURP release (2024.1 Caracal), making it easy for organizations to upgrade directly from one release to the next without worrying about incremental updates.

With enhanced migration tools, improved hardware support, and robust security features, OpenStack continues to evolve to meet the needs of modern cloud environments. The contributions from hundreds of developers and the continued growth of the OpenStack community underscore its importance in the future of cloud computing. Whether you are migrating from VMware or seeking to enhance the security and flexibility of your cloud infrastructure, OpenStack Epoxy is a release worth exploring.

Celebrating 15 Years of OpenStack!

 

February 5, 2025

The last fifteen years of OpenStack’s success is not just about the technology—it’s about the incredible global community that has fueled its growth. Thousands of developers, operators, and users have contributed to its evolution, ensuring that OpenStack remains a robust, scalable, and flexible solution for modern cloud needs. From large enterprises to startups and academic institutions, OpenStack continues to be the backbone of critical applications and services worldwide.

Whether you’re a long-time contributor or just discovering OpenStack, this milestone is a celebration of what we’ve achieved together—and an exciting glimpse into the future of cloud computing.

On July 19, 2025, OpenStack will turn 15, but we will be celebrating all year long! To commemorate OpenStack’s 15th birthday, we’re inviting our community to celebrate throughout the year. Across the globe, OpenStack user groups will be hosting local events to reflect on our journey, discuss the future, and, most importantly, connect.

Find a Birthday Party Near You

The following list of Birthdays is still evolving but here are some upcoming OpenStack birthday celebrations in your community:

  • Kinshasa, DRC – 23 January
  • Melbourne, AU – 17 July
  • Yogyakarta, ID – 19 July
  • Nairobi, Kenya – 6 September
  • China – August
  • Dhaka, Bangladesh – April
  • Milan, IT –  May or June
  • Seoul, KR – July
  • Tokyo, JP – July, Aug or Sept 
  • Austin, TX – October
  • Hungary – TBD
  • Berlin, DE – TBD
  • Myanmar – TBD
  • Mexico – TBD
  • London, EN – TBD

Don’t see your city on the list? No worries! You can organize your own local gathering and join the global OpenStack birthday celebrations. Reach out to [email protected] to get your celebration scheduled.

If your organization is interested in sponsoring a birthday party, reach out to [email protected] for more details.

Let’s make this a year to remember! Share your stories, photos, and experiences using #WeAreOpenStack and connect with fellow community members.

Here’s to 15 years of OpenStack!

OpenStack 2024 Community Progress & Highlights

 

January 15, 2025

Continually supported by one of the most active open source project communities, OpenStack demand surged in 2024, driven by several global trends: digital sovereignty, licensing changes, and AI requirements redefining infrastructure.

While these trends are expected to continue well into 2025, Allison Price, VP of marketing and community at the OpenInfra Foundation, worked with the community to publish new production use cases driven by these trends, including the Dawn Supercomputer, FPT Smart Cloud, Hyundai, KT Cloud, and Lidl (powered by STACKIT). Dubbed a resurgence of OpenStack adoption by tech media, this momentum is expected to increase as more organizations build their infrastructure strategy to power AI workloads and navigate the ongoing disruption in the virtualization landscape.  

One of the biggest drivers for OpenStack demand was around IT decision-makers seeking virtualization alternatives as VMware licensing changes impacted the bottom line for organizations worldwide. When we polled OpenInfra members this year, over 80% indicated that an organization had already contacted them about migrating workloads from VMware to OpenStack, and over 60% had already completed a migration. To further educate the market about OpenStack’s viability as a virtualization alternative, OpenInfra members formed a working group that published a landing page and a commissioned white paper developed by Steven J. Vaughan Nichols, an IT reporter. 

The OpenStack community oversaw the development of its 29th and 30th on-time coordinated releases: 2024.1 ‘Caracal’ and 2024.2 ‘Dalmatian.’ Included were the first officially supported skip-level upgrade path (directly from Antelope to Caracal), increases in platform and Python language version support, and various improvements for support of bare metal, hardware acceleration and AI/ML workloads. 

The secure role-based access control and image encryption efforts had ongoing progress toward completion; five security advisories were issued, culminating in an overhaul of how server image validity is assured; and maintainers embarked upon an arduous journey toward finally replacing OpenStack’s underlying service concurrency library.

Two elections for OpenStack’s technical governance (2024.2 and 2025.1) were held as scheduled in 2024, filling 9 seats with active contributors employed by 6 different organizations. During the first TC election of the year, one of the winning candidates graciously stepped aside in order to avoid having too many seats occupied by employees of any one organization.

Preparations are beginning for a celebration of the project’s 15th birthday in the coming year.

The Open Infrastructure Blueprint (combining Linux, OpenStack, and Kubernetes) is a common open source software architecture deployed by hundreds of organizations around the world. In 2024, the OpenStack community collaborated with other parts of the OpenInfra community, along with adjacent open source communities, to develop the Open Infrastructure Blueprint Whitepaper. This whitepaper outlines the use of a fully open source stack composed of OpenStack, Linux and Kubernetes to meet the rigorous needs of a variety of use cases. Representatives from a number of our member companies shared case studies and reference architectures to further elaborate on the capabilities and benefits of using these technologies together. Examples include Huawei’s Dual Engine and H3C’s CNOOC Cloud.

The OpenInfra Foundation published its 2024 Annual Report where you can learn about more OpenStack community highlights as well as progress made by other OpenInfra projects and working groups.

OpenStack Teams Advance 2025.1 Epoxy Plans at OpenInfra PTG

 

November 7, 2024

The Project Teams Gathering (PTG) is held virtually twice a year and allows OpenInfra community groups and adjacent open source community project teams to meet virtually, exchange ideas and get work done in a productive, low-key setting. Last month, several OpenStack teams participated in the second PTG of the year alongside other OpenInfra projects and community working groups.

Planning is well underway for OpenStack 2025.1 “Epoxy” that will be available on April 2, 2025. These PTG meetings were critical in discussing goals for the release as well as the work that needs to be completed.

Below are several community-developed summaries from these meetings. If you have questions or would like to participate, I encourage you to reach out to the project team and participate!

To learn more about what other project communities discussed and how you can get involved, check out the full PTG summary on Superuser.

OpenStack global footprint exceeds 45 million compute cores as users tackle common obstacles

 

November 16, 2023

The 10th iteration of the OpenStack User Survey highlights expanding footprint of OpenStack clouds, reinforcing architecture trends and introducing new usage patterns  

Over the past 10 years, over 2,200 organizations have voluntarily contributed OpenStack usage data and architecture details, across more than 4,000 deployments as well as feedback for the upstream community to improve the software. Over the decade of measurement, several trends emerged: 

  • The OpenInfra Standard, LOKI (Linux OpenStack Kubernetes Infrastructure), is consistently measured in over 70% of reported OpenStack deployments. Specific components within OpenStack that have seen an increase in adoption over time to deliver this integration include Magnum, Ironic, Kuryr, Kolla, and OpenStack-Helm.    
  • A hybrid cloud approach is adopted by most cloud users, and this trend is supported by a growing marketplace of OpenStack public and private cloud providers. While AWS remains the most common hyperscaler integrated with OpenStack, the OpenStack-powered public cloud network now exceeds 300 data centers worldwide.  
  • Upgrades were a common pain point which prevented many organizations from running the most recent release. 

While the 2023 analysis continues to highlight these trends, new patterns are emerging that have been reported as too complex in previous years. Organizations with smaller teams have proven that a massive internal team is not required to operate an OpenStack cloud, recent releases are gaining traction highlighting community progress in improving upgrades, and the OpenStack footprint continues to grow both with new clouds coming online as well as growth among OpenStack deployments of all sizes. Additional 2023 data around OpenStack operator demographics, deployment decisions, and cloud size can be found on the OpenStack analytics dashboard. 

Global OpenStack Footprint Grows with New Clouds, Growth Across Deployments of All Sizes

The first recorded measure of aggregated OpenStack compute cores was 10 million in 2018. Five years later, the footprint has grown 350% to 45 million compute cores powered by OpenStack running in production. While the growth is most notable among the world’s largest deployments, the growth continues to be seen across deployments of all sizes, regardless of industry and geography. 

A significant contributor to this is LINE, the Japanese messaging app that recently merged with Yahoo! Japan to form LY, whose OpenStack deployment grew from 4 million cores last year to 6.9 million cores this year. Large scale OpenStack user Workday also added another 800,000 cores and OVH reached the 1 million core threshold for the first time and its engineers say this growth is expected to continue. 

While not all deployments are cataloged in the OpenStack User Survey, new clouds continue to be reported. This year, 12% of the clouds came online within the past nine months highlighting that even 13 years in, OpenStack continues to be adopted to set up new public and private cloud infrastructure. 

Smaller Teams Turning to OpenStack Clouds

One of the most interesting data points is around the number of deployments for organizations with 10-99 employees. Around 23% of deployments are managed by an organization this size and that’s the highest percentage this segment has had since 2015. The industry spread here is across academic / research and IT, showing that smaller organizations are having more success in getting OpenStack running in production. 

OpenStack Users Increasingly Implementing Recent Releases 

This year, 81% of OpenStack deployments run a version within the last 5 releases compared to 72% in 2022. The OpenInfra Foundation anticipates that this percentage will continue to improve with the implementation of a new release cadence this year. OpenStack 2023.1 (Antelope), released in March 2023, was the first in the Skip Level Upgrade Release Process (SLURP) cadence recently established by the Technical Committee. Every other release will be considered to be a “SLURP” release. Deployments wishing to stay on the six-month cycle will deploy every “SLURP” and “not-SLURP” release as they always have. Deployments wishing to move to a one-year upgrade cycle will synchronize on a “SLURP” release, and then skip the following “not-SLURP” release, upgrading when the subsequent “SLURP” is released. The community is hopeful that this alleviates some of the complexities within the OpenStack upgrade process.

Share your feedback 

The OpenStack User Survey is open year-round, and is hosted by the OpenInfra Foundation, who supports the OpenStack community as well as other open source projects. This survey captures the deployments and feedback cataloged between August 2022 and August 2023 and this report aggregates trends and notable statistical growth.

The OpenStack User Survey is an annual, opt-in survey for organizations running OpenStack. The analysis presented in this report represents the shared information, but the actual footprint of OpenStack powered clouds is much larger. If you are operating an OpenStack cloud or operating clouds for customers, please take the 2024 User Survey so we can understand the global footprint and pass your anonymous feedback along to the upstream development teams.

New in OpenStack Bobcat: Ironic team supports servicing nodes

 

October 3, 2023

Ironic now enables infrastructure operators to modify existing nodes using the “service steps” framework. Servicing allows operators to leverage steps, like you would for cleaning or customized deployments, to perform actions to modify deployed nodes in an ACTIVE state.

Previously, Ironic would not perform operations on active nodes, largely due to standing technical consensus within the Ironic project. Recent operator feedback and additional new features added to help model and support Data/Infrastructure Processing Units (DPUs/IPUs) has driven the Ironic community to re-evaluate this consensus and to adapt the capabilities in order to  add this new feature.

The main reason we envisioned for this feature was to enable infrastructure operators to perform firmware/software upgrades on these DPU/IPU devices, which are very much like embedded devices enabling a more performant and capable infrastructure environment. Much of Ironic’s work this past cycle was focused on this and similar use cases surrounding add-on Processing Units and their management which also impacts the management of the base physical machine.

Ironic operators have also long sought capabilities to make major changes to deployed nodes in a self-service and automated fashion. These operators have long wanted to perform actions such as re-configure RAID, apply firmware updates, or even re-execute benchmark operations. These actions are often necessary in the world of physical baremetal servers when performing both day to day maintenance as well as working to repair or verify that the equipment has been successfully repaired. The power of Ironic enables that operators can work to perform these actions at scale in an automated fashion, reducing the need to interact with individual server nodes to achieve the same results. This way operators are no longer forced to migrate workloads for relatively minor system modifications.

This added functionality represents a major step forward in terms of capabilities, and also the evolution of capabilities driven by human feedback in our Open Source communities. The project recognizes with any new and complex feature there may be additional room for improvement, or potential edge cases which we did not anticipate, and as such we do expect to continue to work in the area of these features in the coming development cycle (2024.1 “Caracal”) to harden as well further extend these capabilities with an eye on enabling simplified paths to manage complex nested structures within a bare metal node, the foundation of the modern data center. This space is made particularly challenging due to the increased adoption of Add-On Processing Units, but the Ironic project is up to the challenge.

If you’re an infrastructure operator, and interested in joining the discussion during the upcoming PTG, you’re welcome to join us in discussion during the upcoming PTG. Make sure you register for free ahead of time and find out about the topics.

You can learn about  the new Servicing feature, individual steps, and the cleaning framework this feature is built upon.

Learn more about OpenStack Bobcat, the 28th release of OpenStack, that was released on October 4, 2023.

Tags: