Stackers Network Your weekly OpenStack TL;DR

The Big Picture

The week was dominated by one headline event: OpenStack 2026.2 "Hibiscus" shipped on September 30, formally opening the 2027.1 "Indri" development cycle just two weeks ahead of the virtual PTG (October 12–16). Alongside the release, several forward-looking conversations crystallized — a bold vision for keystone-rs and OpenStack authn/authz, a push to add tracing middleware across every service, and the removal of a long-deprecated Neutron OVN component. Operators also surfaced thoughtful questions about RabbitMQ tuning and architectural splits in Cinder.

Releases & Announcements

OpenStack 2026.2 "Hibiscus" was officially released on September 30, concluding the development cycle. Előd Illés announced the final component list at releases.openstack.org/hibiscus. With the release out the door, the openstack/releases repository is now open for 2027.1 "Indri" work, all freezes are lifted, and stable/2026.2 becomes a standard stable branch under normal stable-branch policy. See the announcement thread.

The release will be recapped on an upcoming OpenInfra Live episode, and the PTG team list was finalized (with Swift added belatedly after a nudge).

Development & Technical Decisions

A new vision for Keystone, authn, and authz. Artem Goncharov published a long-form personal vision document explaining the direction of keystone-rs and arguing for a substantial rethink of OpenStack's authentication and authorization story — including a path to resolve the longstanding SRBAC/system-scope friction and support fine-grained permissions without discarding existing semantics. It is explicitly a discussion starter intended to seed a PTG session, not an approved roadmap. Operators and SDK/CLI users should read before Indri PTG.

Tracing middleware across every API service. The Telemetry group, led by Juan Larriba, has landed changes in oslo.middleware and oslo.messaging to add lightweight distributed tracing for OpenStack APIs and the messaging bus. Unlike osprofiler, it's designed to run continuously and is disabled by default. Patches are already up for nova, neutron, cinder, glance and keystone; the goal is coverage of every API-exposing project during Indri. Each service needs a small api-paste.conf (or Flask) change — project teams should expect patches to review.

Cinder control-plane / data-plane split. Arnaud Morin weighed in on Marek's proposal to split Cinder deployment, favoring a Nova-style conductor-based approach for DB access, with a possible further split between volume and backup conductors to allow deployments without backup. An ongoing architectural discussion worth tracking.

Operator question on RabbitMQ tuning. Sergey Korobitsin asked why the "Who Framed RabbitMQ" OpenInfra Summit presentation recommends rabbit_qos_prefetch_count = 1 with quorum/stream queues, when conventional tuning advice suggests 10–30. A useful reference discussion for operators migrating to the newer messaging topology; see also the large-scale guide.

Heads Up / Action Needed

• Neutron: standalone OVN metadata agent removed. Rodolfo Alonso Hernandez announced that 998787 landed in master (2027.1), removing the standalone OVN Metadata agent that was deprecated in 2024.2. Deployment tools, CI, and operators must migrate to the OVN agent with the metadata extension.
• Watcher: Grafana datasource deprecation. Douglas Viroel (Watcher PTL) is deprecating the Grafana datasource in 2027.1, with removal in 2027.2 or later, following the earlier Monasca and Prometheus removals. If you use it in production or want to maintain it (which means standing up a real-Grafana CI job), reply to the thread or the review before the Indri PTG, after which the deprecation will merge.
• Manila gate broken — hold rechecks. Goutham Pacha Ravi reported that a recent Neutron change (bug 2026547) broke shared address scopes used in Manila's IPv6/BGP scenario CI (bug 2169250). Fix in flight at 1008522; hold rechecks on manila and manila-tempest-plugin until it merges.
• Cinder review requests. Dell contributors are asking for review attention on PowerStore manage/unmanage volume support. More broadly, the Cinder Festival of Reviews happens Friday October 2, 1400–1600 UTC — details on the etherpad.

Community & Events

Indri PTG, October 12–16 (virtual). The team list is finalized and project etherpads are filling up. The TC plans to bookend the week with cross-project sessions and is reviving an Operators' Radio Hour-style PTG session. Michal Nasiadka is pushing for a cross-project discussion on Horizon and Horizon plugins with wider maintainer attendance.

TC news. The newly seated Technical Committee has begun electing a chair (gouthamr's candidacy merged) and nominating a vice-chair and liaisons. A notable governance item: the proposed SECURITY.rst goal has merged. The TC is also tracking the community-led effort to revive barbican-ui via a new core-reviewer group. See the weekly summary.

Ops Radio Hour recap. The September 25 session featured Zhan Zhang and Mike Boruta walking through Bloomberg's VM live-migration journey — from the OpenStack API down to QEMU, including monitoring, networking tips and features that smooth migrations. Recording on YouTube and extensive notes on the etherpad. Next call: October 31, 1300 UTC, focused on PTG ops-track takeaways.

Contributor/maintainer experience. Thomas Goirand opened a candid thread about problems with a mail he received regarding contributor recognition, raising broader questions about how the Foundation acknowledges maintainers. The discussion is airing frustration rather than reaching conclusions, but it's a signal worth watching as the community heads into PTG planning for Indri.

Neutron Bug Deputy Note

Lajos Katona's week-39 bug deputy report flagged no critical issues but several highs, including sporadic BGP test failures, an unassigned ovn-bgp-agent MAC bug (2168252), an OS-Ken race that can hang OVS agent startup, and an evpn agent extension interface bug. Patches are in progress for most; the unassigned one needs an owner.