Conductor groups -- In Ironic, the “conductor” is what uses drivers to execute operations on the hardware. Ironic has introduced the “conductor_group” property, which can be used to restrict what nodes a particular conductor (or conductors) have control over. This allows users to isolate nodes based on physical location, reducing network hops for increased security and performance.

RAM Disk deployment interface—A new interface in Ironic for diskless deployments. This is seen in large-scale and high performance computing (HPC) use cases when operators desire fully ephemeral instances for rapidly standing up a large-scale environment.

“OpenStack Ironic provides bare metal cloud services, bringing the automation and speed of provisioning normally associated with virtual machines to physical servers,” said Julia Kreger, principal software engineer at Red Hat and OpenStack Ironic project team lead. “This powerful foundation lets you run VMs and containers in one infrastructure platform, and that’s what operators are looking for.”

"At Oath, OpenStack manages hundreds of thousands of bare metal compute resources in our data centers. We have made significant changes to our supply chain process using OpenStack, fulfilling common bare metal quota requests within minutes,” said James Penick, IaaS Architect at Oath. “We're looking forward to deploying the Rocky release to take advantage of its numerous enhancements such as BIOS management, which will further streamline how we maintain, manage and deploy our infrastructure."

Release-Day Availability
The capabilities of Rocky are available on launch day via a new, Silicon Valley public cloud availability zone powered by Canada-based provider, VEXXHOST. Mohammed Naser, CEO of VEXXHOST, said, “The OpenStack Rocky release makes it possible to deploy quickly and upgrade more easily. This is a huge advantage for public cloud providers, who compete on the ability to push new capabilities to customers faster. OpenStack Rocky made it possible for us to open our new Silicon Valley region on launch day.”

Additional Highlights

Cyborg provides lifecycle management for accelerators like GPUs, FPGA, DPDK and SSDs. In Rocky, Cyborg introduces a new REST API for FPGAs––an accelerator seen in machine learning, image recognition and other HPC use cases––letting users dynamically change the functions loaded on an FPGA device.

Qinling is introduced in Rocky. Qinling (“CHEEN - LEENG”), a function-as-a-service (FaaS) project, delivers serverless capabilities on top of OpenStack clouds, allowing users to run functions on OpenStack clouds without managing servers, VMs or containers, while still connecting to other OpenStack services like Keystone.

Masakari, which supports high availability by providing automatic recovery from failures, expands its monitoring capabilities to include internal failures in an instance, such as a hung OS, data corruption or a scheduling failure.

Octavia, the load balancing project, adds support for UDP (user datagram protocol), bringing load balancing to edge and IoT use cases. UDP is the transport layer frequently seen in voice, video and other real-time applications.

Magnum, a project that makes container orchestration engines and their resources first-class resources in OpenStack, has become a Certified Kubernetes installer in the Rocky cycle. Passing these conformance tests gives users confidence that Magnum interacts with Kubernetes as it is expected to.

Upgrade process delivers new features faster, eases operational burdens
The Fast Forward Upgrade (FFU) feature from the TripleO project is ready for prime time, all set to help users overcome upgrade hurdles and get on newer releases of OpenStack faster. The recent releases of OpenStack delivered a wealth of features to support the evolution in cloud use cases, but users on older versions miss out on these innovations. Now FFU lets a TripleO user on Release “N” quickly speed through intermediary releases to get on Release “N+3” (the current iteration of FFU being the Newton release to Queens), gaining access to the ease-of-operations enhancements and novel developments like vGPU support present in Queens.

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