OpenStack Charms 20.02 – CephFS backend for Manila and more

Canonical is proud to announce the availability of OpenStack Charms 20.02. This new release introduces a range of exciting features and several improvements which enhance Charmed OpenStack across various areas.

CephFS backend for Manila

The OpenStack Charms 20.02 release introduces support for Ceph File System (CephFS) to be used as storage backed for Manila. CephFS is a POSIX-compliant file system providing a file storage layer on top of Ceph. Manila is an OpenStack project providing shared filesystem services for tenants.

Previous releases of OpenStack Charms included manila charm with a generic plugin that could be used to configure the NFS-based backend for Manila. Although this solution was suitable for testing and development, it was not intended for production environments.

The CephFS backend for Manila brings the OpenStack shared filesystem service to the enterprise level. This comes through enabling tenants to benefit from all the best features provided by Ceph, such as high availability, fault tolerance, scalability and security.

In order to deploy or extend Charmed OpenStack with CephFS backed for Manila, users have to use additional charms (ceph-fs, manila and manila-ganesha). These have been introduced and stabilised in this release. Please refer to the official documentation for information on how to integrate new charms with the existing deployment.

Other features in OpenStack Charms 20.02

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.

• Policy Overrides for more charms – the Policy Overrides feature provides operators with a mechanism to override policy defaults on a per-service basis. The last release introduced the feature for several charms. This release expands this feature across openstack-dashboard and octavia charms.
• Ability to disable instance snapshots – users can now disable snapshots as valid boot sources when launching instances in the OpenStack dashboard. They can do it via the new configuration option (disable-instance-shapshot) in the openstack-dashboard charm.
• Actions for Vault – users can now pause and resume the Vault service by using charm actions. This expands the model-driven approach to operations in the OpenStack ecosystem.
• OVN (preview) – this release updates the tech preview suite of charms that allows modelling Open Virtual Network (OVN). OVN provides open-source network virtualisation for Open vSwitch (OVS).
• MySQL 8 (preview) – this release updates two tech preview charms to deploy MySQL 8 for OpenStack: mysql-innodb-cluster and mysql-router. Both are available for use with Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan).
• Swift Global Cluster (preview) – Swift charms have now been extended with an option which allows multi-region deployments. This allows global cluster setups and ensures geo-redundancy of Swift clusters.

Upgrading to OpenStack Charms 20.02

We recommend that you upgrade to the latest stable charm revision before proceeding with topological changes, charm application migrations, workload upgrades, series upgrades, or bug reports. To upgrade an existing deployment to the latest charm version, use the upgrade-charm command:

$ juju upgrade-charm keystone

Please ensure that you upgrade the keystone charm first. Note that charm upgrades and OpenStack upgrades are functionally different and a charm upgrade will not trigger an OpenStack upgrade. Please refer to the official documentation for more details.

Get in touch

If you are interested in OpenStack consulting, support or fully managed solution, get in touch!

For more information about OpenStack Charms 20.02, please refer to the official release notes.