OpenStack 'Queens' struts into the spotlight

The 17th version of OpenStack is upon us.

"Queens" landed on March 1st, with virtual GPU support in the Nova virtualization module the headline feature.

Virtual GPUs make a lot of sense for OpenStack users in the context of another addition: the "Cyborg" framework for managing hardware and software acceleration resources. Cyborg's designed to handle GPUs and hardware like FPGAs, CryptoCards or fast packet processing libraries like DPDK/SPDK.

Another notable addition is "Zun", a new OpenStack project offering a container service designed to offer quick spawning of containers by integrating with Neutron, Cinder, Keystone and other core OpenStack services. Doing so makes OpenStack's networking, storage and authentication tools available to container fleets, which is just the sort of stuff containers need if they're to satisfy security and compliance requirements.

Zun joins Nova and Ironic to give OpenStack a troika of tools for running workloads. Nova does virtulization. Ironic wrangles bare metal. And Zun does containers.

Container users may also appreciate the new Kuryr CNI Daemon, which lets Kubernetes-tended microservices scale by allowing automated scaling without too many calls to K8s APIs.

Queens also makes it easier to deploy OpenStack services as containers with the new LOCI module. LOCI is aimed at edge computing so that containerised OpenStack functions can be spawned to diverse and far-flung computing resources. Doing so will help carriers - a key class of users for OpenStack - use the stack more effectively by allowing them to add modules when and where they're needed.

OpenStack's pointed interested parties at stackalytics.com if they're keen to know who to blame thank for this release. Red Hat led the way in terms of contributions, followed by Huawei. Nova got the most developer love. Andreas Jaeger made the most individual contributions. As was the case for OpenStack Pike.

Who did what to whom in OpenStack Queens. Click here to embiggen

Full release notes for Queens are yours for the reading here, if you have nothing better to do this weekend.

The next version of OpenStack is called "Rocky" and should appear in September 2018. Queens gets its coming-out party at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver in May 2018. ®