OpenStack Charms 20.08 – TrilioVault, Arista and more

Canonical is proud to announce the availability of OpenStack Charms 20.08. This new release introduces a range of exciting features and several improvements which enhance Charmed OpenStack.

TrilioVault backup and recovery

One of the biggest enhancements brought by the OpenStack Charms 20.08 release is an addition of TrilioVault for OpenStack. TrilioVault is a backup and recovery solution that natively integrates with OpenStack, providing data protection capabilities for workloads running in the cloud. It integrates with the OpenStack dashboard to provide tenant-level control and visibility for backup administrators in a single view.

TrilioVault for OpenStack is available in the form of four charms: trilio-data-mover, trilio-dm-api, trilio-horizon-plugin and trilio-wlm that can be seamlessly plugged into the Charmed OpenStack deployment. Refer to the OpenStack Charms documentation for exact integration steps. All charms are released as stable and will be supported under the Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure (UA-I) subscription. Canonical and Trilio have partnered to ensure that the joint solution is fully tested and validated.

Read more about the partnership between Canonical and Trilio in the official announcement.

Arista ML2 driver

Another notable feature in the 20.08 release is support for Arista ML2 driver in the OpenStack Neutron API service. Arista has already been available as an in-tree ML2 driver in the upstream OpenStack for a while. It allows OpenStack users to automatically provision tenant networks across the physical network infrastructure consisting of all types of Arista switches. The supported types of tenant networks include VLAN and VXLAN.

Support for Arista ML2 driver will be provided in the form of a neutron-api-plugin-arista charm. When related to the neutron-api charm it will install the Arista Neutron packages on each Neutron API unit in the region and supply the desired configuration to the Neutron API service. Refer to the OpenStack Charms documentation for exact steps required to deploy the Arista charm as well as to upgrade from previous versions.

TLS for MySQL

The communication between MySQL InnoDB Cluster and its cloud clients is now secured with TLS through the certificates issued by Vault secret storage. This ensures data encryption on the fly and increases the level of security provided by the Charmed OpenStack cloud. 

Previously, TLS was only enabled for inter-MySQL client communication by way of a self-signed certificate. Due to the circular dependency between Vault and MySQL InnoDB Cluster, the enablement of this feature can only be done post-deployment – once Vault has been initialised and has a root Certificate Authority.

Other notable changes in OpenStack Charms 20.08

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.

• Gnocchi S3 support – the gnocchi charm can now use S3 as a storage backend instead of Ceph.
• Glance Simplestreams Sync – the glance-simplestreams-sync charm now installs simplestreams as a snap.
• ‘ceph-access’ relation – when both the nova-compute and cinder-ceph charms are deployed a new relation – ‘ceph-access’ –  is now required.
• keystone-kerberos charm – a charm to integrate Keystone with an external Kerberos server is now available in a tech preview state.

Upgrading to OpenStack Charms 20.08

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 with Canonical!

For more information about OpenStack Charms 20.08, please refer to the official release notes.