During the Flamingo cycle, multiple OpenStack components including the Ironic bare metal service, Mistral workflow-as-a-service, Barbican key management service and Heat orchestration services completed their migrations. They now use Python 3’s native asyncio framework. The Nova compute and Neutron networking projects made substantial progress. Nine other projects are currently in migration.
The work addresses fundamental architectural decisions made early in OpenStack’s history.
“We made some choices with Python 2 back in the early days, how do we handle concurrency and all that,” Carrez explained. “Our reliance on Eventlet was really a thorn in our side. It was threatening the long-term sustainability of the project, with less and less people working on Eventlet in Python.”
The migration has been under discussion for years. It gained significant momentum during this cycle as the community formed dedicated teams. The benefits extend beyond just using supported code.
“It has all the benefits from adopting a modern framework that’s being natively developed for the language, versus using something that was developed as an extension for a previous version of Python,” Carrez said.
Security and confidential computing enhancements
Security improvements represent a major theme throughout the Flamingo release.
