OpenStack Stein: Kubernetes and Bare Metal

Earlier this month (April 10, to be precise), the OpenStack community released Stein, the 19th version of its hugely popular open source cloud infrastructure software.

And if you thought that after 19 releases the OpenStack project teams would be struggling to find new stuff to include, you’ll likely be surprised by what’s in Stein. That’s because as well as the usual tweaks and feature improvements you’d expect, there’s also a bunch of new features.

But before we get down to the nuts and bolts of Stein, let’s first address its name. Traditional German or Bavarian beer mug? No, but not a million miles away.

Stein is actually named after Steinstraße or “Stein Street” in Berlin, where the OpenStack design summit for the corresponding release took place in 2018.

What’s New

Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of development activity has been focused on Kubernetes, as well as the necessary tools to manage these container clusters. Now, with Stein, the time taken to launch a Kubernetes cluster has reduced significantly, down from around 10-12 minutes per node to five minutes regardless of the number of nodes.

Stein also includes updates to the OpenStack project networking service, Neutron, which now boasts Network Segment Range Management, enabling cloud administrators to manage network segment type ranges dynamically.

Ironic, the OpenStack project’s bare-metal provisioning service, has also been updated and now offers better deployment templates. For example, standalone users can now request allocations of bare-metal nodes with specific configuration data. Previously, they had to use pre-formed configuration drives.

Other changes in the release include:

• Blazar, the resource reservation service, has a new resource allocation API.
• Placement, a new project that offers the ability to target a candidate resource provider, making it easier to specify a workload migration host.
• Sahara, a project for easily provisioning Hadoop clusters, has been refactored into a “core+plugins” architecture for ease of use.
• Keystone, the OpenStack identity service, has introduced multi-factor authentication receipts.
• Kolla, which provides production-ready containers, can now perform full and incremental backups of the MariaDB database.

During the Stein development cycle, there were, on average, 155 commits per day. This highlights that despite much of the hype surrounding OpenStack dying down in recent years, it remains an extremely active open source project (right up there with the likes of Chromium and Linux kernel, in fact).

Speaking about Stein, Jonathan Bryce, the OpenStack Foundation executive director, said:

“With Stein, operators gain new capabilities for bare metal management and networking, running high-performance workloads with GPUs, operating and Network functions virtualization (NFV) deployments. OpenStack has also become a powerful platform for managing Kubernetes clusters in private and multi-cloud deployments.”

You can see the full list of all new features in Stein here.