OpenStack Adoption Soars Amidst Technical Debt Revamp

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Key points:

  • The OpenStack cloud infrastructure project has released its 32nd version, OpenStack Flamingo, which introduces almost 8,000 changes, including improvements to security and technical debt reduction.
  • The new release aims to eliminate OpenStack’s dependency on Eventlet, a concurrency library originally developed for Python 2, and instead use Python 3’s native asyncio framework.
  • Security enhancements in OpenStack Flamingo include support for one-time-use passthrough devices, AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization with Encrypted State (SEV-ES), and incremental security improvements in other OpenStack projects.

As a reporter, I’m here to bring you the latest news from the world of cloud infrastructure. Today, the OpenStack project announced its 32nd release, OpenStack Flamingo. This new version is the result of a year of change for OpenStack, including the integration of the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra) into the Linux Foundation. Despite this change, the core focus and technical development practices of OpenStack remain the same.

OpenStack Flamingo is a significant release, with almost 8,000 changes introduced by over 480 contributors from multiple organizations, including Ericsson, Rackspace, Red Hat, Walmart, Samsung SDS, SAP, and Nvidia. The focus of this release is on eliminating long-standing technical debt and improving security. According to Thierry Carrez, general manager of the OpenInfra Foundation, "What we’ve seen over the last cycle is an increase in contributions and number of contributors compared to the Epoxy cycle, which is a good sign that OpenStack is in this plateau of productivity and is there for the long run."

One of the most significant technical changes in OpenStack Flamingo is the reduction of technical debt. The project has been working to eliminate its dependency on Eventlet, a concurrency library originally developed for Python 2. This library has seen declining maintenance, and its use has been a thorn in the side of the OpenStack project. During the Flamingo cycle, multiple OpenStack components, including Ironic, Mistral, Barbican, and Heat, completed their migrations to Python 3’s native asyncio framework. The Nova compute and Neutron networking projects also made substantial progress, with nine other projects currently in migration.

The benefits of this migration extend beyond just using supported code. Carrez explained that it has all the benefits from adopting a modern framework that’s being natively developed for the language, versus using something that was developed as an extension for a previous version of Python. Additionally, the migration addresses fundamental architectural decisions made early in OpenStack’s history, which will help ensure the project’s long-term sustainability.

Security enhancements are also a major theme in OpenStack Flamingo. The Nova compute project adds support for one-time-use passthrough devices, which remain in a reserved state after instance deletion rather than becoming automatically available. This allows operators to perform security checks or hardware resets before device reuse. Nova also adds support for AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization with Encrypted State (SEV-ES), which extends confidential computing capabilities. Other security improvements include incremental security enhancements in other OpenStack projects, such as Magnum, Manila, and Horizon.

Neutron, the networking project, introduces several enhancements focused on OVN deployments and access control in the Flamingo release. OVN is a network virtualization solution that provides software-defined networking capabilities for OpenStack. The OVN agent has replaced the OVN Metadata Agent, which will be deprecated in a future release. This represents a consolidation of functionality and simplifies the agent architecture on compute nodes. Other improvements include the ability to configure floating IP NAT rules in OVN as stateless, which can improve performance by avoiding connection tracking overhead.

As the OpenStack project looks to the future, the next release, OpenStack 2026.1 (Gazpacho), is scheduled for April 2026. Carrez expects the community to complete the Eventlet migration across all projects in the next release cycle. Additionally, AI inference workloads are emerging as a focus area, with the potential for new features and adaptations at the OpenStack level. With its strong focus on security, technical debt reduction, and innovation, OpenStack Flamingo is an important release for the cloud infrastructure project, and sets the stage for its continued growth and development in the years to come. The OpenStack community is committed to providing a robust and secure cloud infrastructure platform, and this release is a significant step towards achieving that goal.

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