OpenStack Ussuri release shores up security and reliability, extends support for GPUs and FPGAs

OpenStack, the open source cloud platform, marks its 21st release on Wednesday. Badged Ussuri, this release shores up security and encryption, improves support for the newer types of specialised graphics processing units (GPUs) and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that are popular with machine learning and other compute-intensive workloads, and makes numerous improvements and tweaks to improve the reliability and performance of the core infrastructure layer.

OpenStack is a collection of 32 components rolled into a ‘cloud operating system' that's designed to support public and private cloud operations at scale. It emerged a decade ago as a response to proprietary cloud platforms that were then coming onto the market. It boasts the third largest open source community in terms of contributions after Linux and Chromium.

During a press call, OpenStack Foundation COO Mark Collier said Ussuri brings "substantial changes within every major project within OpenStack."

Many of these changes concern automation and security within the infrastructure layer and are a reflection of the ever more heterogeneous nature of data centre infrastructure, as driven by the needs of workloads such as AI/ML and the industrial IoT.

"All of the compute hardware is changing, and this is also true of storage and networking. Completely new architectures are required to deliver the performance characteristics for edge computing or AI," Collier said.

Among the new and updated features highlighted by the OpenStack Foundation were the following.

Cyborg, the accelerator life cycle management solution, has been integrated with the Nova compute service, meaning that GPUs and other accelerated hardware can now be managed through Nova.

Nova itself now supports cold migration and server resizing between cells.

Ironic, the bare metal cloud service, now has automated provisioning.

Kuryr, a ‘bridge between OpenStack and container networking' now supports IPv6.

Octavia, the load balancing service, can now deploy to specific availability zones including edge environments, and encryption options have been expanded making compliance easier to enforce.

The roadmap to the next release Victoria, in around 6-months' time, features more of the same types of refinements, Collier said.

"There's a big market, there's a lot of people who want to run it are there's a lot of hard problems to solve in continuing to scale out, reliability, security and encryption."

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• Cloud and Infrastructure
• Open Source
• OpenStack
• Cloud computing
• cloud infrastructure