How OpenStack Flamingo's features came to life

The OpenInfra Foundation has collaborated with the OpenStack community to highlight some of the prominent features of the Flamingo release; more cycle highlights can be found here. 

• Nova now supports one-time use passthrough devices. Such devices are allocated to a single instance, and when the instance is deleted, the device stays in a reserved state instead of becoming automatically available. This ensures operators can perform necessary security checks or hardware resets before reusing the device.
• Nova also added support for AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization – Encrypted State (SEV-ES) with libvirt, extending confidential computing capabilities in Nova to protect guest memory and CPU register state.
• Magnum added a new API endpoint to allow the rotation of credentials in an existing cluster. This can be used to transfer cluster ownership, or recreate invalidated credentials
• Manila now supports bringing your own encryption key for encrypted share servers
• Horizon can now display a QR Code to allow setting up a new TOTP in an authentication app on your phone

• Eventlet was introduced in the early days of OpenStack as a way to drive asynchronous operations. Python 3 introduced asyncio, a more native way to handle asynchronous operations, while Eventlet became less and less maintained
• Migrating OpenStack off Eventlet is a significant undertaking, but it is necessary to pay back that technical debt to ensure OpenStack’s sustainability long-term. Octavia paved the way by migrating early in 2017.
• During the Flamingo development cycle, Ironic, Mistral, Barbican and Heat all fully migrated away from Eventlet ! Neutron API, RPC, agents (metadata, DHCP, L3, etc), workers and all associated code also migrated away, as well as Nova API, metadata, and scheduler services.

• Designate adding support for Service Binding (SVCB) and HTTPS resource records, significantly reducing the handshake latency for new endpoint connections
• Manila adding support for restoring share backups on a share different from its source
• Nova improving memory performance by supporting QEMU’s memory balloon autodeflate and free page reporting features with the libvirt driver
• Watcher now offers granular controls for live and cold migration scenarios in its Host Maintenance strategy, giving operators precise control over workload placement during maintenance.

 Contributor List

Thank you to the nearly 500 contributors who contributed to the OpenStack Flamingo release.