Today, the cloud is everything. But, in 2010, the cloud was barely real. Still, at NASA Ames Research Center and Rackspace, developers decided that the best way to build a cloud was to build it from open-source software. Together, by 2012 they created the first major open-source, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, OpenStack. Ten years later, OpenStack is releasing its 25th update, Yoga.

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OpenStack's come a long, long way since then. Today, OpenStack is managed by the Open Infrastructure Foundation. While some think OpenStack has become an also-ran in the cloud wars, the truth is it's a quiet success story. The total number of OpenStack managed cores has grown by 66%, and the IaaS cloud now manages over 25 million production CPU cores. In particular, OpenStack is vital in the telecom industry where 90% of the top telcos rely on it. It's not just the 4G and 5G companies though. Other large businesses such as Bloomberg, Walmart, Workday, and Yahoo depend on it.

OpenStack is only growing more important. Indeed, OpenInfra Foundation COO Mark Collier said, "We added 10 million cores in a year. This is the biggest jump I think we've ever seen year over year. It's awesome. One hundred new clouds were built just in the past year. We have seven organizations now running over a million cores."

In short, OpenStack is doing just fine. 

Also: The Open Infrastructure Foundation announces its first board

One reason for its continuing success story is that OpenStack can run pretty much anything you'd ever need in an IaaS cloud. That includes bare metal, virtual machines (VMs), graphics processing units (GPUs), and containers. It also integrated vital cloud-native software such as Kubernetes and Prometheus.

Yoga highlights include support for advanced hardware features such as NVIDIA Smart network interface cards (SmartNIC) and data processing units (DPUs). NVIDIA, which is now working with OpenStack, is making such functions as encryption/decryption, firewalling, packet inspection, routing, and storage networking work much faster on OpenStack deployments.

Specifically, OpenStack's networking as a service Neutron now supports a remote-managed virtual network interface card type and enables port binding to SmartNIC DPUs. In addition, OpenStack Nova compute program also now supports network backends that leverage SmartNICs to offload the control plane from the host server. This enables increased security by removing the control plane from the host server and reduced overhead by leveraging the CPU and RAM resources on modern SmartNIC DPUs.

Neutron with SmartNIC DPUs also now supports Local Internet Protocol (IP) for high-performance networking for large-scale. A Local IP is a virtual IP, which can be shared across multiple ports or VMs. It's also a private IP address, which is guaranteed to only be reachable within the same physical server or node boundaries.

Also: LOKI: An open-source enterprise cloud to call your own

The Manila file system now supports soft deletes. With these file system shares can now be deleted into a recycle bin where they can safely stay before being purged. While in the recycle bin, the shares can be viewed and restored on demand.

Yoga also includes better Prometheus and Kubernetes compatibility. For example, more unique metrics are now available for Prometheus. Kolla, OpenStack's production-ready containers and deployment tool, now supports Prometheus Libvirt exporter. While Tacker, OpenStack's virtual networking tool, now enables you to use Docker private registry images or Helm charts to deploy Container Network Functions (CNFs). 

Some other basic changes include that Ironic, OpenStack's bare metal provisioning program default deployment boot mode, now supports UEFI instead of legacy BIOS. Meanwhile, Kolla is depreciating binary images. In the next release, all binary image support will be removed. You must migrate to source-based images going forward. 

Looking ahead, OpenStack is changing its release cadence. Until recently, OpenStack has published two releases a year. Operators, who haven't been keen on migrating twice a year, have asked for a slower upgrade cycle. So, starting in 2023, OpenStack is moving to a "tick-tock" schedule, with one major and one minor release a year. 

Today, though, OpenStack Yoga is ready for you to download and run.  

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