OpenInfra Foundation Brings Bootc Container Images to OpenStack
The OpenInfra Foundation has released its 31st update to the open source OpenStack framework, dubbed Epoxy, that enables bootc container images that incorporate operating systems to now be directly deployed on bare metal machines using the Ironic infrastructure provisioning tool.
That capability streamlines the deployment of operating system updates using containers without requiring IT teams using OpenStack to acquire a separate set of tools.
Additionally, Ironic now supports pulling artifacts and images from container registries that are compatible with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specification for building open container runtime environments that ensure interoperability.
The Ironic framework also now has a graphical console of a host using a new ironic-novncproxy service, a schema validation framework for application programming interfaces (APIs) and removed support for PostgreSQL. Only databases compatible with MySQL interface are now supported.
There are in this Epoxy release of OpenStack a host of additional updates to the other modules that make up the framework, including, for example, an upgrade to the Masakari high availability (HA) service that now enables that module to invoke the Kubernetes application programming interface (API) to retrieve the status of a host. If any anomaly is detected, a notification will be sent to the masakari-api to trigger an HA workflow.
Jonathan Bryce, CEO, executive director of the OpenInfra Foundation, said the latest release shows that the OpenStack community remains vibrant in terms of its ability to embrace new and emerging technologies. For example, with this release, OpenStack now supports a range of AI accelerators that many organizations are adopting as alternatives to graphical processor units (GPUs), he noted.
It’s not clear how widely OpenStack is being employed, and not every organization that uses the core framework makes use of every module. However, most organizations have opted to deploy Kubernetes on top of some type of virtualization platform to ensure isolation between application environments. The OpenInfra Foundation is betting that in the wake of recent changes to VMware licensing made by Broadcom, more organizations will look to OpenStack to provide those capabilities at a lower total cost.
At the same time, OpenStack, via its Ironic module, can be used to provision bare metal servers as well, at a time when, for example, more workloads are being deployed that require the highest level of performance possible.
Regardless of approach, collaboration between the maintainers of OpenStack and Kubernetes should continue to improve in the wake of the OpenInfra Foundation becoming an arm of the Linux Foundation, which is the parent consortium of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that oversees the development of Kubernetes.
That tighter integration should also make it simpler for IT teams to embrace platform engineering as a methodology for centralizing the management of infrastructure using an OpenStack platform that was designed with that very goal in mind, said Bryce.
The challenge, as always, is creating the political capital within an organization to define and maintain a single set of IT standards that everyone concerned will, rather than actively resist, proactively embrace.
