OpenStack Charms 19.10 – Train, Policy Overrides and more

Canonical is proud to announce the availability of OpenStack Charms 19.10. This new release introduces a range of exciting features and several improvements which enhance Charmed OpenStack across various areas.

To learn more about Charmed OpenStack, visit our page.

OpenStack Train

This release introduces support for OpenStack Train on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (via Ubuntu Cloud Archive) and Ubuntu 19.10. Train is the 20th OpenStack release which brings a lot of interesting features on its own. One of the most important additions are telco-specific extensions to Nova live migration. The benefits of moving guest machines from one hypervisor to another without shutting down the operating system of the guest are now also available in telco-specific environments with NUMA topology, pinned CPUs, SR-IOV ports attached and huge pages configured.

In order to upgrade your Charmed OpenStack installation to Train, please follow the procedure described in the charm release notes.

For more information about OpenStack Train, please refer to the upstream release notes.

Policy Overrides

The Policy Overrides feature provides operators with a mechanism to override policy defaults on a per-service basis.

Policy defaults for an OpenStack service are defined via “policy-in-code” and/or via a default policy YAML file provided by the charm. The operator can use the new feature by providing a ZIP file consisting of at least one YAML. The file contains policy rules that the service will observe when responding to API queries. This allows operators to selectively override the default policies of that service.

This feature is being provided in the following charms:

• cinder
• designate
• glance
• keystone
• neutron-api
• nova-cloud-controller

Please consult the README for each charm to determine exactly what is provided with respect to this feature.

Remaining features in OpenStack Charms 19.10

With each new feature, there is a corresponding example bundle in the form of a test bundle, and/or an OpenStack Charms Deployment Guide section which details the use of the feature.

• Ceph Nautilus – along with OpenStack Train, the 19.10 release includes support for the Ceph Nautilus release.
• Ceph Placement Group Autotuning – in Ceph Nautilus, the OpenStack Charms now support autotuning of placement groups.
• DNS caching enabled by default for instance migration– the 19.07 release introduced the option to enable caching of DNS lookups of the nova-compute units which are used by Nova to perform migrations of tenant instances between nova-compute units. This is not enabled by default.
• Neutron Port Forwarding – Neutron port forwarding extension can now be optionally enabled with OpenStack Charms 19.10 for OpenStack Rocky and later.
• Migration to FQDN for agent registration – starting with OpenStack Charms 19.10, when deploying OpenStack Stein or newer, the Nova Compute agent as deployed by the nova-compute charm and Neutron agents as deployed by the neutron-openvswitch charm will use a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) when registering with the API services.
• Ceph RADOS Gateway tenant namespacing – the ceph-radosgw charm now supports deployment with tenant namespaces. This is enabled during initial deployment using the namespace-tenants configuration option.
• Placement Charm – the 19.10 release introduces a new charm for the placement API. The placement API service was extracted from the Nova project in OpenStack Train and moved to its own project. Therefore, the new placement charm must be deployed and related to the nova-cloud-controller charm for OpenStack Train deployments.
• Cinder Integration with Pure Storage Array – the 19.10 release introduces a new charm which can be used to integrate Cinder with a Pure Storage array.

For more information about OpenStack Charms 19.10, please refer to the official release notes.

To learn more about Canonical’s solutions for OpenStack, visit our page.