Open-source cloud royalty: OpenStack Queens released
Video: The age of cloud data center dominance is here
Cloud
The cloud is growing faster than ever, and OpenStack, the open-source cloud for the enterprise, is growing with it.
By next year, 60 percent of enterprise workloads will run in the cloud, according to 451 Research's Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation, Workloads and Key Projects survey. While much of that growth is in the public cloud, OpenStack enterprise adoption is expanding, with enterprises in nearly all businesses turning to private and hybrid cloud models for their mission-critical workloads. Indeed, as OpenStack moves toward making more than $6 billion in 2021, OpenStack's private clouds are expected to deliver more revenue than its public cloud implementations.
Technology innovations are driving OpenStack's growth. In the just-released OpenStack Queens, the following new features will bring in new customers.
Cinder Multi-Attach enables sysadmins to attach the same Cinder volume, OpenStack's block storage program, to multiple virtual machines (VM). Thus, if one node goes down, the other takes over with full access to the volume. This redundancy, which supports high availability (HA) for mission critical workloads, has long been requested, and now it's finally here.
Support for vGPUshas been added to Nova, OpenStack's compute manager. This enables cloud administrators toset up VMs with vGPUs baked in. VGPUs are becoming increasingly important for scientific, artificial intelligence, and machine learning workloads.
Cyborg, previously known as Nomad, is a new framework for managing hardware and software acceleration resources such as GPUs, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), and Data Plane Development Kit / Storage Performance Development Kit (DPDK/SPDK)-enabled hardware. This provides easy access to compute acceleration hardware, which has become vital for many companies, especially for telcos with Network function virtualization (NFV) workloads.
Ironic Rescue Mode is for instance repair. It has long been available for VMs in Nova, and it's now available for bare metal instances in Ironic, OpenStack's bare metal provisioning program. Operators can now troubleshoot misconfigured bare metal nodes or recover from issues like a lost SSH key.
Kuryr Container Networking Interface (CNI) Daemon helps incorporate OpenStack into the container orchetection program Kubernetes by adding a CNI daemon. To better support HA, Kuryr watches for pod events, eliminating the need to wait on the Kubernetes API for each event. With this, Kubernetes pods can be created even if the controller goes down
Zun container serviceis a new OpenStack project. It enables users to quickly start and run containers without having to manage servers or clusters. It also seamlessly adds enterprise networking, storage, and authentication capabilities to containers by integrating them with Neutron, Cinder, Keystone, and other core OpenStack services.
"In the early days of cloud, the use cases were fairly narrow, but the scope of cloud use cases today has expanded to include a massive variety of workloads," said OpenStack foundation chief operating officer Mark Collier in a statement. "Just as the scope of cloud evolves, OpenStack evolves as a platform. Consider the vGPU and containers enhancements in the Queens release: they address opposite ends of the use-case spectrum and demonstrate how OpenStack has the flexibility and ability to support changing open infrastructure requirements."