The OpenStack community recently released Zed, the 26th version of the world’s most widely deployed open source cloud infrastructure software. Zed highlights include enhanced security features and expanded hardware enablement. In addition, the OpenStack community is responding to user feedback through two new projects, Venus, which delivers log aggregation for large deployments, and Skyline, which promises an improved web UI.

The Zed release comprises 15,500 changes authored by over 710 contributors from more than 140 organizations and 44 countries—all accomplished in merely 27 weeks. Feature advancements in Zed include:

Security enhancements:
Cinder: Block Storage API microversion 3.70 adds the ability for users to transfer encrypted volumes across projects. Previously only unencrypted volumes were supported to be transferred. Also all the snapshots associated with the volume will be transferred along with the encrypted volume.
Keystone: OAuth 2.0 support added.
Hardware enablement:
Cinder: New backend drivers were added: DataCore iSCSI and FC, Dell PowerStore NFS, Yadro Tatlin Unified iSCSI, Dell PowerStore NVMe-TCP and Pure Storage NVMe-RoCE storage drivers.
Cyborg: Cyborg now offers an Xilinx FPGA driver, which can manage Xilinx FPGA devices, including discovering devices’ info and programming xclbin. Proposes a spec of adding NVIDIA MIG for A100 devices. Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) is new feature in Cyborg that allows GPUs based on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture (such as NVIDIA A100) to be securely partitioned, which is different from VGPU feature; the MIG driver is needed to manage compatibility with PGPU and VGPU.
Nova: Virtual IOMMU devices can now be created and attached to an instance when running on a x86 host and using the libvirt driver.

In conjunction with the Zed release, OpenStack Venus is introduced as a one-stop log aggregation service tailored towards operators, allowing them to collect, clean, index, analyze, create alarms, visualize and generate reports on OpenStack logs. Venus is of particular benefit to operators who are managing large OpenStack deployments, as it provides a way to quickly solve retrieved problems, grasp the operational health of the platform, and improve the level of platform management.

OpenStack Skyline is a new OpenStack dashboard project with original code contributed by 99Cloud. Using a technology stack based on React, Skyline features a more modern webapp architecture and is designed to handle user requests and multiple current commands more gracefully than Horizon. Skyline is considered by the OpenStack Technical Committee to be in an “emerging technology state,” not yet ready for production.

Naming Convention Returns to A: The naming convention for future OpenStack releases will now circle back to the beginning of the alphabet and the year of the release will be incorporated into the name as well, so that it is easier to remember when it was released. The 27th release of OpenStack, slated for March 22, 2023, will be named OpenStack 2023.1 Antelope.

New Release Cadence: OpenStack 2023.1 Antelope is the first Skip Level Upgrade Release Process (SLURP) release in a new release cadence established by the Technical Committee. Every other release will be considered to be a “SLURP” release. Deployments wishing to stay on the six-month cycle will deploy every “SLURP” and “not-SLURP” release as they always have. Deployments wishing to move to a one-year upgrade cycle will synchronize on a “SLURP” release, and then skip the following “not-SLURP” release, upgrading when the subsequent “SLURP” is released.

Also, the Technical Committee has established a convention for identifying projects that are in emerging (new but not yet ready to run in production) or inactive (not well maintained) states.