Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

1. OpenStack upgrade problem

OpenStack is increasingly accepted as an enterprise framework for automating data center infrastructure and enabling enterprises to operate a wide variety of applications and services.

In 2010, the platform appeared on the market as a joint project of hosting service providers Rackspace and NASA. Currently, it has grown into one of the largest open source projects to date, and its release is driven by biannual meetings of the OpenStack community, each of which generally announces the priorities of the next version.

Market research shows that more and more enterprise OpenStack deployments are moving from pilot projects (test and development platforms) to full production, but there are still some issues to be solved-the most important of which is to ensure that the numerous components that make up OpenStack are smoothly updated when upgrading to the latest version. Upgrades to earlier versions of OpenStack were always problematic, in part because most of the development work at that time focused on ensuring that it was fully functional as an IaaS platform.

Early adopters often find themselves faced with an incredible choice-either take the OpenStack infrastructure offline while installing the new code, or simply migrate the workload to a completely independent deployment based on the new code. Such an upgrade makes the entire original platform need to spend a lot of time in the upgrade process to interrupt business, upgrade related software packages, and consider the interdependence of software packages. After the upgrade is completed, a lot of testing needs to be done to ensure that other existing OpenStack components are not affected, and such upgrades often make users "miserable."

2. OpenStack product upgrade support

With the efforts of the OpenStack community and the progress of products, and the improvement of the quality of operation and maintenance personnel, the upgrade has become more and more controllable and has less impact on the business. In particular, after the launch of Kolla containerized deployment of OpenStack products, due to the characteristics of the container, each component can be decoupled and "atomized" can be upgraded, which makes it easy to deal with the upgrade problem that has been criticized before.

Newer versions of OpenStack, such as the Queen version released earlier this year, focus more on stability and reliability, emphasizing that all modules are upgraded as close to zero downtime as possible. The OpenStack community is also attracting users to upgrade Openstack products by continuously improving the functionality and stability of the products, as well as making users interested in upgrading the OpenStack that is already deployed and running in the computer room.

However, the latest user survey results show that more than half of OpenStack users are still running platforms that are more than two versions older than the latest version. This means that according to the official life cycle of OpenStack, the versions of these users are "not supported". Companies that package and distribute OpenStack builds usually provide longer (usually three to five years) business support. More importantly, it may mean that they are using OpenStack software modules that have been considered to have security vulnerabilities and problems since their release.

3. OpenStack upgrade becomes easier

Openstack iteration is very fast, half-yearly updates often introduce new features, and the improvement of the original function. Each new release contains a large number of new features and improvements in performance stability.

Version upgrade has become an inevitable problem. Due to the complexity of openstack upgrades, many companies and teams have adopted the option of migrating directly to the new version of the cloud, which is a feasible solution.

In some cases, upgrading OpenStack also means updating the operating system layer, and OpenStack's value proposition revolves largely around its ease of customization and high pluggability. One of the advantages of OpenStack is that it has a comprehensive set of application programming interface (API) services that plug in different storage and network technologies, and has a very healthy ecosystem around OpenStack and distributions.

In fact, "pure" OpenStack (that is, the original OpenStack without customization modification) is not difficult to upgrade, because each version of OpenStack is designed for seamless rolling updates (rollover) and undergoes extensive community testing to ensure that the upgrade process is as smooth as possible. During the upgrade process, the downtime of the production environment should be reduced as much as possible, so it is necessary to optimize the upgrade process and smooth the upgrade.

In terms of the principle of software evolution, high availability and robustness of software products can only be improved in the process of continuous bug repair. During the process from the early version to the latest version, there are several large versions of progress, then OpenStack has a qualitative change in terms of functionality, ease of use or stability. While constantly repairing bug, community developers also think about the problem of user feedback. Instead of being divorced from the actual user. In addition, the community also recommends using a lower version (Queens) than the latest version (Rocky), which not only increases the functionality and stability of the community, but also reduces the risks that may exist in the latest version.

4. Diversity of functions

New projects have been added to each version of OpenStack's products, especially after the community implemented the big tent strategy, new projects have emerged one after another, especially new projects such as cinder multi-attach solved the problem of shared storage, cyborg has better support for GPU, and Plecement API has been introduced. It gives users better visibility, cellv2 module supports larger deployment scale, octavia module provides a new way to solve LB, keystone adds multi-factor authentication rules to improve the security of cloud platform, interface also reflects the added functions of each version in Horizon components, containerization also adds components such as kuryr and zun to integrate container platform, and OpenStack-Helm is used to manage the life cycle of OpenStack on Kubernetes. There are many wonderful new features to match users' pain points.

5. Some false reports

Due to the competition between some Vmware vendors and those who support the direct deployment of containers on bare metal, some reports may have used some embellishments in order to exaggerate the shortcomings of OpenStack. It is an one-sided view from the "substantial reduction" of OpenStack community developers or the "exponential increase" of bug. Judging from the number of resolved bug in the OpenStack community from the Mikata version to the Queens version, each component has some degree of increase and decrease, rather than a simple increase in the number of bug, let alone an "exponential" increase.

6. Advantages of OpenStack upgrade

OpenStack is software. If it is software, there will be bug. OpenStack contains a lot of components, the structure is very loose, each component can be updated separately, as long as ensure that each component belongs to the same large version (such as kilo, liberty) will not have a problem. When you encounter bug in the old version, if the community already has a fix, you just need to update the component that contains the fix, and the other components remain the same.

6.1 High efficiency. After the upgrade is completed, it has high efficiency. This goal is mainly reflected in: first, the efficient use of resources, time resources and space resources, and fully tap the available value of the server, because the new components have the characteristics of less resources and more efficient calculation, which meets the efficiency of upgrading; the second is operation, OpenStack upgrade provides users with convenient operation, on the basis of the original functions to provide program modification, software assembly, instruction adjustment and other new functions.

6.2 economy. The successful development of a new software product requires a lot of manpower, material and financial resources. From the point of view of cost, new software products need to meet the standards of lasting application. With the help of the community, OpenStack does not need to invest in OpenStack software development, so that the product upgrade does not need to spend too much cost, creating good economic benefits. And the community releases 2 versions a year, so it doesn't cause frequent updates.

6.3 Security. OpenStack product upgrade is equipped with higher security defense features, timely supplement and improvement of common feature defects, and enhance the anti-* * capability of cloud products. For example, user authentication turns on stronger security defense functions, and has better support for network security protocols, thus improving the anti-invasion performance of software engineering systems.

6.4 Stability. As the OpenStack community has a large number of developers, and the code quality varies, and each version has a lot of obvious or not obvious Bug, then the known Bug can be repaired during the upgrade process to improve the stability of OpenStack cloud products, so as to avoid problems found in production, resulting in greater losses. It is also in line with the spiral rising characteristics of software upgrade.

6.5 loose coupling. Loose coupling is an important goal of upgrading, which greatly reduces the cost of upgrading. Because OpenStack components are loosely coupled, you only need to change one module to achieve a reasonable "plug and play" to achieve a single component upgrade without making major changes to OpenStack cloud products. It shortens the time consumed by reprogramming, which is the inevitable trend of upgrading, improves the efficiency of software products, shortens the recompilation time, and is more in line with the characteristics of painless upgrade.

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