Mirantis OpenStack for K8s 21.5 Delivers Greater Scalability & Enhanced Connectivity

Mirantis is pleased to announce the availability of Mirantis OpenStack for K8s, version 21.5. This release expands upon the open nature of the Mirantis offerings by extending the workload orchestration service, provides an early look into Block Storage Encryption, and enhances the product documentation to provide you with a clear mapping of the versions of the major components that comprise every Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes release.

Tungsten Fabric plugin for OpenStack Heat

It is not uncommon for Telco operators to rely on the Tungsten Fabric API directly to get much more granular and advanced control over their virtual networking, as the standard OpenStack networking (Neutron) API alone is often not enough for their needs. At the same time, they still need to deploy and manage network applications in an automated fashion, which is commonly accomplished with the workload orchestration service (OpenStack Heat). Starting with Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes 21.5, every Tungsten Fabric-based Mirantis OpenStack cloud gets an additional extension pre-installed which allows users to control Software Defined Network by managing Tungsten Fabric primitives directly from their OpenStack Heat templates.

Technical Preview of Block Storage Encryption

Companies involved in private data processing and other security-conscious cloud operators are looking to offer their workloads the ability to encrypt persistent data. With the Block Storage Encryption capability available starting in this Mirantis OpenStack release, cloud users can pre-define special “encrypted” volumes types in the block storage service (OpenStack Cinder) and associate them with the keys stored in the secret manager service (OpenStack Barbican). All the data written to a volume instantiated from such a special type will get encrypted, transparently to the VMs, directly on the compute node before getting sent to the block storage backend (Ceph). We welcome you to give this Technical Preview a spin and share your feedback on the functionality ahead of its official general availability release.

Release Compatibility Matrix

At Mirantis, we believe velocity is the key to technology evolution. As you probably have noticed already, Mirantis OpenStack is built as a fast-moving product — just this year we managed to deliver 5 (!) releases, each carrying a sizeable payload of new features, stability improvements, fun fixes, etc.

But we’ve heard you - maintaining your open-source Cloud Infrastructure solution can be complicated when there are so many moving parts. In order to help our customers navigate across the rapidly changing landscape of Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes, we have put together a map - just a single page telling cloud operators:

• Where they are now - the versions of the major components they are using: OpenStack, Ceph, Tungsten Fabric, etc.
• Where they should be moving - the latest available versions of the software.
• And how - references to the upgrade paths for each major component.

You can learn more about these, and other features provided in Mirantis OpenStack 21.5 in the release notes.

If you’d like to begin a free trial of Mirantis OpenStack, you can get started here.