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OpenStack has delivered its 32nd major release, named "Flamingo."
OpenStack Technical Committee chair Goutham Pacha Ravi singled out work to remove eventlet dependencies as a major feature of this release.
Eventlet is a concurrent networking library for Python that, as explained by the Open Infrastructure Foundation's Julia Kreger, "was a foundational technology which OpenStack [was] based on to address concurrency in a Python process."
Eventlet did a job, but its developers recommend not using it. As stated on the project's GitHub repo: "New usages of eventlet are now heavily discouraged!"
"Eventlet was created almost 18 years ago, at a time where async features were absent from the CPython stdlib. With time eventlet evolved and CPython too, but since several years the maintenance activity of eventlet decreased leading to a growing gap between eventlet and the CPython implementation," the repo explains.
Eventlet's devs believe "this gap is now too high and can lead you to unexpected side effects and bugs in your applications."
Kreger says the tool "has been holding OpenStack projects back," and documentation for the removal project mentions "persistent operational problems in OpenStack deployments."
Ditching eventlet is not just a cleanup job. It also means OpenStack's bare-metal "Ironic" module will soon become a true multi-threaded application.
"I could not be prouder of the persistence and collaboration that made this progress possible," said Ravi. "By paying down this technical debt, we have strengthened OpenStack for the next 15 years and beyond. OpenStack is here for the long run, and I want to congratulate the entire community for reaching this significant milestone together."
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Flamingo includes over 8,000 changes, coded by around 480 contributors from organizations including Ericsson, Rackspace, Red Hat, Walmart, BBC R&D, Samsung SDS, SAP, and Nvidia.
Notable new bits include one-time passthrough in the Nova compute module, meaning VMs can enjoy dedicated use of hardware like GPUs. Nova also gains support for AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization.
OpenStack's Skyline dashboard gains a rescue feature for recovering Nova instances, improved network security, and a better UI.
The Manila shared file system service now supports bring your own key (BYOK) encryption for share servers, and has caught up with Dell branding by renaming an Isilon driver to reflect the fact that EMC acquired a vendor of that name 15 years ago before Dell changed its name to "PowerScale." The driver now supports thin provisioning for shares.
OpenStack has published a shortlist of notable additions, and each module in the project publishes its own release notes here.
The OpenInfra project reckons Flamingo could help propel OpenStack beyond the 55 million cores that use the platform in production today, as orgs consider it as a VMware alternative, or an environment to handle AI, ML, or HPC workloads. Or all at once!
That may be wishful thinking as Flamingo is a "Non-SLURP" release that OpenStack users can skip without making it harder to adopt future releases, the next of which is due in April 2026 and will glory in the name OpenStack 2026.1 (Gazpacho). ®
