OpenStack releases Ussuri version to automate intelligent open source infrastructure

Date: Oct 25, 2022

From 2010 to 2020, the OpenStack project has gone through ten spring, summer, autumn and winter. In the past 10 years, the controversy about OpenStack has continued, but it is undeniable that in the disputes of different technical routes, the vitality of OpenStack is still unparalleled. According to the market monitoring report released by 451 Research Institute in September 2019, OpenStack is still growing rapidly, and the market share in the Asia-Pacific region is expected to increase by 36% in the next four years, and the global market share will reach 7.7 billion US dollars in 2023.



In addition to the technology itself, the OpenStack Foundation, the behind-the-scenes promoter, can make OpenStack stand out among many open source projects. Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, emphasized that the most important goal of the foundation and the community is to allow users to deploy and apply software on a large scale. Last year, the scale of OpenStack computing cores reached 10 million, and the deployment scale is expected to be even larger this year.

After 10 years of history, OpenStack still exudes a fresh scientific and technological atmosphere. On May 13, the OpenStack community officially released the 21st version of the most widely deployed open source cloud infrastructure software – Ussuri. This version mainly improves three core areas. First, continue to improve the reliability of the core infrastructure layer; second, Enhanced security and data encryption; third, expanded versatility to support emerging use cases.

Specifically, focusing more on the core area of ​​reliability at the core infrastructure layer, Jonathan Bryce introduced that the new features help the OpenStack cloud platform to scale across data centers, making it easier to manage workloads when scaling the cloud computing platform. For example, it has added support for cold migration between Nova units and resizing of server partitions, and added automated bare metal hardware configuration; added support for IPv6, which has become a bridge between OpenStack and container networks.

Focusing on security and encryption updates, among them, Load Balancer Service, for the TLS secure network transmission protocol, can accept new TLS ciphertexts from pools, enabling load balancing to enforce security compliance; Kolla as The Ussuri version added support for TLS internal encryption for the first time. Kolla's support for TLS encryption enables communication between containerized OpenStack services to be automatically added with TLS encryption. In some use cases, stateless security groups will allow operators to choose the best data path, while stateful security groups will impose additional processing on the system; new support in Neutron - stateless security groups (stateless security groups) security groups), which not only makes resources more usable, but also releases more resources relatively, which can make network expansion and large-scale deployment more possible.

Extending the versatility to support emerging use cases, the Cyborg project is highlighted first, in the Ussuri version as a powerful hardware accelerator that is fully integrated with Nova and Neutron. In addition, Cyborg has been able to manage GPU or IPG hardware accelerators, and push the upgrade code directly to the FPGA, to Nova virtual machines and computing instances, so workloads can be configured and run with these accelerators, an important feature for The implementation of a smart open source infrastructure is critical and the functionality is already implemented in the Ussuri version of Cyborg;

In addition, the Octavia load balancing project adds support for deploying load balancers in specific availability zones, so that load balancing functions can be deployed to edge environments; Magnum can install Kubernetes in OpenStack, making it possible to run in OpenStack environments Kubernetes is simpler. In addition to providing support for upgraded versions of Kubernetes, Ussuri also adds support for operating system upgrades of Kubernetes clusters (including master nodes and worker nodes); Zun, as a container service component in the OpenStack project, adds support for Kubernetes CRI runtime support. Zun uses the CRI runtime to implement the concept of capsules (pods), so Kubernetes users can use the Zun API to create pods in secure Kata Containers.

It should be emphasized that the OpenStack Ussuri version received a total of 24,000 code changes from 1003 developers in 188 organizations and more than 50 countries. The OpenStack project is now supported by a large global open source community, and ranks with Linux kernel and Chromium as one of the three most active open source projects in the world.



Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, said: "Led by large-scale operational users, OpenStack is deployed in every industry and on almost every continent. The global community of users and developers supporting OpenStack has not only steadily improved the software's performance. The core function also actively promotes innovation to support emerging and important application cases at various software levels. With the release of the Ussuri version, the community provides applications ranging from bare metal to edge, from automated servers, accelerator deployments to load balancing servers, container security performance enhancements, etc.”

OpenStack Foundation projects continue to progress, including established airship, kata, zuul, openstack, and the pilot project STARLINGX. In introducing the continuous latest project progress, Adan noticed a new project in 2020 - OpenInfra Labs. OpenInfra Labs is a community created by and for operation and maintenance personnel. The community tests open source in the actual production environment Code, publishes complete and reproducible stacks for existing and emerging workloads to promote the development of open source infrastructure, aiming to bridge open source projects and production practices, and open the last mile of OSS.



The project provides open-source tools to run cloud computing platforms, containers, AI, machine learning, and edge workloads reproducibly and predictably: provide complete use cases through integration testing of all required software; provide running upstream projects in production Documentation for operational and functional differentiation; the importance of shared code repositories for operational tools and "glue" code, often written independently by users, is clear at a glance.

Talking about the future, OpenStack has made a huge leap from open source cloud to open source infrastructure. What is the development direction of OpenStack in the future? Jonathan Bryce emphasized: "When it comes to intelligent open source infrastructure, we are actually talking about the huge demand for the underlying computing storage network in emerging use cases, so the next generation of infrastructure focuses on investment in 5G mobile networks, as well as artificial intelligence, machine learning, The Internet of Things is a major trend for social and economic development, and more importantly, the use of open source infrastructure tools to provide support, promote the development and maturity of technology in these areas."

Coinciding with China's launch of the "New Infrastructure" plan, Jonathan Bryce said: "If a 5G mobile network is to be built, it is necessary to use the automated computing network and storage resources of the underlying infrastructure for edge deployment, not only in cities, but also in mobile networks. It extends to remote areas, so infrastructure is very important for the construction of 5G. Therefore, intelligent infrastructure is not only an OpenStack project, but also integrates Kubernetes and a series of network, security, storage tools, etc. We focus on the integration of open source tools, not limited to the OpenStack project itself or the community's open source projects, we will integrate relevant and important open source tools in the entire open source environment. And this is why OpenInfra Labs One of the raison d'être is to hopefully drive the development of a broader open source infrastructure platform."