Ussuri, the 21st release of the cloud infrastructure software OpenStack, delivers automation for intelligent open infrastructure.
OpenStack Ussuri, coming up on Wednesday, May 13, includes many exciting features among which we mention improvements in core functionality, automation, cross-cell cold migration, containerized applications, and support for new use cases at multiple levels in the stack.
“Constant innovation with each OpenStack release is what we at Sardina Systems and our customers value the most at the OpenStack technology. Most of our customers are already benefiting from Train release features from flexible highly available enterprise cloud at UPSI in Malaysia to simplified operations of a more secure cloud platform for critical care medical records at Incarta Australia, or flexible OpenStack-managed multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters at a prestigious public research university in Germany, and we are excited about upgrading to the new Ussuri release in the nearest future — with zero-downtime as always, ensuring no compromise to business uptime,” Mihaela Constantinescu, CMO, Sardina Systems.
Among the many enhancements provided in Ussuri, three highlights are:
- Ongoing improvements to the reliability of the core infrastructure layer
- Enhancements to security and encryption capabilities
- Extended versatility to deliver support for new and emerging use cases
We have seen during the years that customers tend to have different requirements for their on-premises IaaS architecture and these situations require different capabilities when it comes to building a cloud architecture. There is no general capability that can respond to all the customers’ needs.
The Ussuri release confirms once again why OpenStack is the most popular private cloud open-source solution among any size enterprise business, and the 21st release features are making the OpenStack distribution even more stable like:
Focus on Reliability of Core Infrastructure Layer
- Nova (Compute Service) added support for cold migrating and resizing servers between Nova cells
- Support for IPV6 was added by Kuryr (the bridge between OpenStack and container networking)
- Ironic (bare metal provisioning) added automated bare metal hardware provisioning
Enhanced Security and Encryption
- Octavia (Load Balancing Service) users can now specify the Transport Layer Security (TLS) ciphers acceptable for listeners and pools, which allows load balancers to enforce security compliance requirements.
- In Ussuri, Kolla (Containerized Deployment of OpenStack) added initial support for TLS encryption of backend API services, providing end-to-end encryption of API traffic. Currently, Keystone is supported.
- Support for stateless security groups has been added to OpenStack Neutron (Networking). Users can now create a security group set as stateless which means that the contract will not be used for any rule in that group. One port can only use stateless or stateful security groups. In some use cases, stateless security groups will allow operators to choose for optimized datapath performance whereas stateful security groups impose extra processing on the system.
Added Versatility for Emerging Use Cases
- Integration with Nova has been completed in Cyborg (Accelerator Lifecycle Management). Users can now use Nova to launch server instances with accelerators managed by Cyborg.
- Octavia added support for deploying load balancers in specific availability zones, which enables the deployment of load balancing capabilities to edge environments.
- Along with the Kubernetes version upgrade support, Magnum (Container Infrastructure Management Service) added the support to upgrade the operating system of the Kubernetes cluster including master and worker nodes.
- In Ussuri, Zun (Containers Service) added support for CRI-compatible runtime. Zun uses CRI runtime to realize the concept of the capsule (pod), so as a result, users can use the Zun API to create pods in Kata Containers via a CRI runtime.
We invite you to read about all the Ussuri Release Highlights in more detail here.