OpenStack leaps forward with the release of Wallaby

This week we see the release of OpenStack’s W release, Wallaby… *YAWN*. It’s definitely a sign of a project’s success and maturity when its major biannual releases become boring!

I’ve been involved with the OpenStack project for the last 7 years, and it’s been a pleasure to watch the project technically mature and grow over the years. While there have definitely been many eras in the project’s lifetime, it’s undeniable that in recent years it’s been markedly easier to deploy and manage OpenStack. This is thanks in large to the efforts of the many upstream developers working on the Kolla project, which makes OpenStack deployment almost too easy.

With dozens of projects, there are lots and lots of updates in Wallaby, but here are some of the notable updates we see in this release:

• Out of the box OIDC support in Kolla
  OpenID Connect is now supported natively by kolla-ansible. Previously if we wanted to configure Keystone to pull authentication from an external identity provider it would require quite a lot of manual intervention and messing about with Keystone configuration, as some of our customers have experienced first-hand. Thanks to this patch, a lot of the heavy lifting is now done for us by kolla-ansible.
• Adding support for S3 as a backup driver for Cinder
  While we’ve had support for Ceph as a backup driver to Cinder for a while, a new backup driver with S3 support has been added, which gives us the ability to address a Ceph cluster even if we don’t necessarily want to do any integration at all with OpenStack.
• Fast-diff support for Ceph’s Cinder backups
  Where we are using the Ceph backup driver for our backups, we now have support for fast-diff, which – assuming we’ve enabled exclusive lock on our RBD image – dramatically improve performance for Ceph backups.
• Additional and more granular support for quotas in Cinder
  cinder-manage now has a few more commands which let us query and manage quotas, especially on longer-running deployments where things may be out of sync.
• Support for Prometheus v2
  Prometheus v2 is now supported by Kolla, and Prometheus 1.x has been swiftly deprecated, with support dropped later this year.
• Cinder project statement of support for Ceph releases
  Finally, and this is quite cool – the Cinder project has explicitly clarified its position on Ceph support, as this has historically not always been clear. The stated position is that “For a given OpenStack release, Cinder supports the current Ceph active stable releases plus the two prior releases.” This means that Wallaby will officially support all of Pacific, Octopus, Nautilus, and Mimic. Upstream cross-testing and support of lots of different versions of Ceph is yet another example of the many reasons why Ceph is a much better choice as your storage backend for OpenStack than anything else.

So there you have it… Update your yaml to “Wallaby” and deploy away, I’ll definitely be doing the same in our Berlin Lab!

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