OpenStack Yoga on Ubuntu LTS delivers highly performant infrastructure for telcos and researchers with SmartNICs and DPUs

March 31, London – Canonical today announced the general availability of OpenStack Yoga on Ubuntu 22.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Beta and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. This new version of OpenStack sets a foundation for next-generation, highly performant infrastructure as needed by telco NFV, media streaming, traffic analysis and HPC services, using SmartNIC cards and integrating them with the Neutron Open Virtual Network (OVN) driver. With OpenStack network components running on SmartNICs, users benefit from lower latency, higher throughput, and better quality of services.

“With OpenStack now running on over 25 million cores in production in diverse settings like telcos, service providers, and research institutions, infrastructure performance becomes one of the key directions for further research and development.” — said Thierry Carrez, General Manager at the Open Infrastructure Foundation — “It’s great to see long-time members of our community working together to bring about architectural changes that increase the efficiency of cloud workloads for the benefit of end-users.”

Among various performance improvements, Yoga – the 25th release of OpenStack – comes with further integration with SmartNICs. Cloud administrators can fully move OVN components, such as ovn-controller and ovs-vswitchd, to run on data processing units (DPUs) and SmartNICs. This effectively offloads hypervisors’ central processing units (CPUs) and accelerates data plane network traffic. As a result, network-sensitive workloads such as virtual network functions (VNFs) benefit from extra compute resources and fast data processing. The pioneering SmartNIC integration work was driven by the Canonical team in cooperation with the upstream community.

Read upstream documentation >

Read NVIDIA’s reference implementation >

“Deploying industry-leading technologies such as AI, 5G and simulated virtual worlds has put new demands on data center networking infrastrastructure.” said Kevin Deierling, senior vice president of networking at NVIDIA. “The extreme performance of NVIDIA’s BlueField DPU enables next-generation architectures, such as OpenStack on Ubuntu, to power breakthrough innovations with the potential to bring transformative benefits to society.“

The innovations mentioned by Deierling are backed by rich lifecycle management capabilities available in OpenStack Yoga on Ubuntu. Users can deploy OVN components, configure them according to their needs, and integrate them with SmartNICs by running just a few commands, thanks to the high-level abstraction provided by OpenStack Charms. This also works for any Day-2 operations. 

“Our long-term commitment is to equip developers and executives with a cloud platform that provides highly performant infrastructure at a low cost.” – said Nicholas Dimotakis, VP, Global Field Engineering at Canonical – “OpenStack Yoga with its native support for running OVN on SmartNICs and the automation provided by OpenStack Charms establishes an important milestone on our way to price-performance optimised infrastructure.”

Being the default OpenStack version on the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, OpenStack Yoga benefits from Canonical’s standard LTS commitments. These include 5 years of commercial support under the Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure (UA-I) subscription and 10 years of security updates under the Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) programme. All of that makes OpenStack Yoga on Ubuntu LTS an ideal candidate for production environments.

Full commercial support and operations code for OpenStack Yoga on Ubuntu will come with the OpenStack Charms 22.04 release on April 20th.

OpenStack Yoga: new features

The following section briefly describes the most notable features introduced to core OpenStack projects in the upstream Yoga release:

Cinder:

• Existing volumes can now be made bootable
• API has been enhanced for improved consistency with other OpenStack services

Designate:

• Users can now create TXT records over 255 characters in length

Glance:

• Cloud administrators can now get quota usage information
• Cloud administrators can now fetch additional information about RBD store
• New APIs for cache related operations

Manila:

• Shares can now be soft-deleted into a recycle bin where they can stay for a configurable amount of time before being purged
• Cloud administrators can now direct provisioning of shares and replicas to specific hosts via scheduler hints
• Users can now specify more than one subnet on their share networks across any availability zone.

Neutron:

• Cloud administrators can now offload OVN components to SmartNICs and DPUs
• Local IP – a virtual IP which can be shared across multiple ports or VMs is now available
• Nova instances can now be scheduled to compute hosts that will honor the minimum pps requirements of the instance as defined by QoS policies of its ports

Nova:

• Nova now provides AArch64, PPC64LE, MIPs, and s390x emulated architecture support independent of the host architecture

Octavia:

• Octavia load balancers now support deep observability by adding PROMETHEUS listeners that expose a Prometheus exporter endpoint
• The Octavia controllers and amphora instances can now be run with Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 enforcement enabled

Learn more about OpenStack Yoga

Get OpenStack Yoga on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Beta by visiting our website.

Join our webinar on April 20th to learn more about all the new exciting features available in OpenStack Yoga.

Get in touch with Canonical for more information about our commercial plans.

About Canonical

Canonical is the publisher of Ubuntu, the OS for most public cloud workloads as well as the emerging categories of smart gateways, self-driving cars and advanced robots. Canonical provides enterprise security, support and services to commercial users of Ubuntu. Established in 2004, we power the majority of workloads in the global hyperscalers, in addition to born-in-the-cloud giants such as Netflix, Uber, Tesla, AirBnB, and over 10,000 other cloud-forward enterprises globally.