An old cloud learns new tricks: OpenStack Dalmation

OpenStack Dalmatian, the 30th release of the popular open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, has bounded onto the scene, bringing with it a host of enhancements tailored for AI workloads, improved security, and a refined user experience.

For years, OpenStack has been the cloud of choice for telecoms deploying 5G. In recent years, however, it's expanded well beyond that marketplace. Today, more than 45 million cores are in production. OpenStack has been embraced by thousands of users of all sizes and across industries, including mega-users such as Walmart, Hyundai, GEICO, and Yahoo. It is becoming a popular replacement for VMWare. 

With the Dalmatian release, OpenStack has also been expanding into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) markets. 

Specifically, Blazar,  OpenStack's resource reservation service, now supports reserving GPU instances on  Nova, OpenStack's compute flavors. In addition, in Nova, with the libvirt driver, the open-source application programming interface (API) virtualization daemon and management tool and libvirt version 7.3.0 or newer, mediated devices for vGPUs are now persisted across reboots of a compute host. This offers more convenience and efficiency improvements for machine learning (ML) systems.

In addition, OpenStack's security has been improved.  For example, the Ironic bare-metal provisioning service now requires hashed rescue passwords and mandates HTTPS for inter-service communication. Nova can also now detect virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) support for compute services running libvirt version 8.0.0 or higher.

The Skyline dashboard is also now fully production-ready. It's also added support for Masakari (high-availability instance recovery), Designate, DNS-as-a-Service, and Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS). The Skyline dashboard also provides a more intuitive and user-friendly interface, making OpenStack more accessible to organizations transitioning from VMware.

Indeed, in August 2024, Rackspace announced its newest service, Rackspace OpenStack Enterprise, which will include Skyline as its dashboard instead of the older Horizon. Kevin Carter, Rackspace's product director, said,  "At Rackspace, we are all about simplifying the management of cloud systems. OpenStack Skyline, with its intuitive and user-friendly interface, simplifies the complex task of managing cloud services. It creates beautiful administrative experiences allowing users to manage services at scale, with ease and efficiency." That sounds good to me!

OpenStack is also adding yet more compatibility with other open-source cloud-native systems. Thierry Carrez, the OpenInfra Foundation's general manager, said. "Also reflected in the Dalmatian release is the community's determination to integrate with a wide variety of open-source tools and platforms as well as cutting-edge hardware. We want to thank all of the organizations and individuals who actively use and contribute to OpenStack, especially the 487 contributors who submitted 7,640 changes over the past six months to keep OpenStack powering advancement and innovation all over the world."

At the same time, though, OpenStack remains solid and mature. The Dalmatian changes are improvements that are building on what has gone before. As Mark Collier, OpenStack's COO, told me at OpenInfra Summit Asia in Suwon, South Korea, "OpenStack has been proven to work. It's been bulletproof for so many years." In addition, "Thanks to the best practices being documented and the software's maturity, we have one company where each OpenStack administrator covers two data centers. The number of people it takes to operate this stuff has just gone way down. That, in turn, means when the CFO says, 'Can we do it in-house?' The answer is yes." 

If your question is, "Can OpenStack Dalmation help me with my private cloud? Can it replace VMWare? Can I use it to deploy AI and ML in my company?" The answer is, again, yes.  

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