OpenStack Dalmatian knocks spots off AI workload doghouse
As the world of enterprise open source solidifies, an increasing number of developments are being laid down to take open platform technologies into more expansive mission-critical and quite frankly enterprise-level software topologies.
This could be why we’re seeing so much work focused on the lower substrate infrastructure layer.
The OpenStack community has this month released 2024.2 Dalmatian, the 30th version of this open source cloud infrastructure software offering designed to deliver support for AI workloads with enhanced security with its widespread maintenance updates.
This release comes as the OpenStack market is estimated at $22.81 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach US$91.44 billion by 2029, growing at a CAGR of 32%.
OpenStack advocates suggest that the technology is currently experiencing a significant surge in adoption, attributed largely to the software’s popularity as a VMware alternative and its suitability for supporting artificial intelligence, machine learning and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.
Open Infrastructure Blueprint
Another driver of OpenStack adoption is its integration with Linux and Kubernetes in the “Open Infrastructure Blueprint,” which allows users to deploy container-based, virtual machine-based and bare metal-based workloads in the same infrastructure.
OpenStack is of course supported by the Open Infrastructure Foundation.
A key part of what now comes forward in Dalmatian is Skyline – which is a dashboard designed to improve the user interface – and the team is now saying that this modernised web UI is now fully supported (it was in technology preview until now) as part of the official OpenStack release.
This development comes as interest in Skyline (as a dashboard of choice) is said to be increasing. In August 2024, Rackspace announced its newest service, Rackspace OpenStack Enterprise, which includes Skyline as the dashboard instead of Horizon.
With its design and user-friendly interface, Skyline is said to significantly reduce navigation time and presents information in more human-readable formats.
“The upgrades, new features and maintenance work delivered in the Dalmatian release demonstrate a hallmark of the OpenStack community: its commitment to collaborating globally to address evolving technology needs,” said Thierry Carrez, general manager of the OpenInfra Foundation. “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 organisations and individuals who actively use and contribute to OpenStack, especially the 487 contributors who submitted 7,640 changes over the past 6 months to keep OpenStack powering advancement and innovation all over the world.”
Dalmatian advances OpenStack’s support of AI and HPC workloads – for example
- Blazar introduced support for reserving compute instances based on existing Nova flavors. This can be used to provide reservation of GPU instances.
- In Nova, with the libvirt driver 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 users of hardware accelerators, many of whom currently may be training AI systems.
OpenStack Dalmatian showcases several ways the community continues to adapt the software to enhance usability. These features are key for organizations who are migrating from VMware to OpenStack.
In 2022, the OpenStack community adopted a once-a-year SLURP release cadence designed to ease the demands upon operators to upgrade every six months. OpenStack Dalmatian is a ‘not-SLURP release’, which means it is offered in the six-month interim of annual SLURP releases expressly for those who wish to upgrade more frequently.
Free Image; Wikipedia