OpenInfra Foundation: OpenStack Epoxy Arrives, Strengthening Position as VMware Alternative, Support for AI as Global Demand Surges
As the OpenStack community celebrates its 15th birthday and shares new and growing user stories, OpenStack Epoxy delivers security and maintenance upgrades and support for VMware migration and AI workloads.
AUSTIN, Texas, April 2, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- OpenStack adoption is surging as the OpenStack community celebrates its 31st release – 2025.1 Epoxy – and the 15th birthday of the world's most widely deployed open source cloud infrastructure software. With more than 940,000 changes committed since 2010 and 45 million cores in production, OpenStack is embraced by thousands of users of all sizes and across industries, including many "mega-users" running a million CPU cores or more.
***The OpenStack Epoxy release is available for download.***
OpenStack Market Growing Exponentially
OpenStack is currently experiencing a significant surge in adoption, mainly attributed to the software's popularity as a VMware alternative and its unique suitability for supporting artificial intelligence (AI) and other high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. Another driver of OpenStack adoption is its integration with Linux and Kubernetes in the "Open Infrastructure Blueprint," which empowers users to deploy container-based, virtual machine-based, and bare metal-based workloads in the same infrastructure. Digital sovereignty is also a growth factor: OpenStack drives hundreds of private and public clouds all over the world, enabling organizations to access local and secure infrastructure resources.
Mordor Intelligence estimates the OpenStack market, valued at $22.81 billion in 2024, will reach $91.44 billion by 2029, a CAGR of 32%. In addition, Forrester points to the likelihood that OpenStack will benefit from private cloud investments in 2025. "In 2025, Forrester predicts that most major public cloud providers will increase investments in private cloud. Hyperconverged offerings like Nutanix and open-source projects like OpenStack will see increased interest."
Walmart Details Its Massive OpenStack Deployment
Gerald Bothello, senior director of cloud engineering at Walmart Global Technology, was a keynote presenter at OpenInfra Days North America last month. Bothello described how Walmart, which has one of the largest OpenStack deployments in the world, has evolved its OpenStack strategy over the past decade. After starting with thousands of cores in 2014, success was quickly proven during a busy holiday season. Fast forward to now, Walmart's OpenStack footprint exceeds 1 million cores, seamlessly integrates with their public cloud environments, and takes 48 hours to upgrade, compared to the previous duration of 30 days.
Numerous other organizations have stepped forward recently to share their unique use cases and growing deployments, including:
OpenStack Community and Ecosystem Remain Strong, Reliable and Committed
Since the project's launch 15 years ago, OpenStack has been one of the world's most active open source projects, and it remains so today. The community, which releases new versions on a reliable six-month schedule, boasts over 940,000 code changes from nearly 10,000 contributors representing hundreds of organizations worldwide.
Around 450 contributors from organizations including BBC R&D, Blizzard Entertainment, Canonical, Cleura, Ericsson, Mirantis, NVIDIA, Rackspace, Red Hat, and Samsung SDS built Epoxy, delivering over 7,600 changes and widespread maintenance updates.
OpenDev Plays Critical Role in Epoxy Release
OpenStack relied on OpenDev services to thoroughly test each of the 7,600 changes that made up the Epoxy release and to build the final release artifacts. During the Epoxy release cycle, the OpenDev Zuul CI service ran over 1.1 million jobs for continuous integration and artifact publication.
OpenDev is a collaboratory for open source software development at scale. Its goal is to support the projects hosted by the OpenInfra Foundation with open source tooling and open source systems administration. OpenDev focuses on code review, continuous integration, and project hosting provided exclusively through open source solutions like Git, Gerrit, Zuul and Gitea.
Epoxy Release Highlights
Within the Epoxy release, features were added to strengthen OpenStack as a VMware virtualization alternative, enhance security, and improve hardware enablement, including enhancements to solidify support of AI workloads.
Strengthen OpenStack as VMware Alternative
- Within Watcher, a new Prometheus data source has been added. For VMware migration, having Prometheus integrated into OpenStack via Watcher allows for efficient monitoring of the existing VMware infrastructure and the migration process. This enables tracking performance and identifying bottlenecks during the migration.
- This release includes features and bug fixes for many Cinder supported storage hardware drivers, including NetApp, PowerMax, LightBits, Fujitsu, PowerFlex, 3par, StorPool, Pure Storage, Nimble, and Hitachi. The improved support of a wide range of Cinder drivers signals the simplification of migrating workloads that are heavily reliant on specific storage solutions. Additionally, after migration, OpenStack environments can retain compatibility with existing storage infrastructure, making the transition smoother and reducing any risks related to storage and data accessibility.
Enhance Security
- Manila users are now able to modify the access level of a share access rule, switching it from "read-only" to "read-write" or vice versa. This feature allows for more precise control over who can modify and access shared resources. If users can limit their access to read-only, they can prevent unauthorized modifications, reducing the risk of accidental or malicious changes to data.
- Manila users can also now set and modify share server characteristics via share network subnet metadata. Cloud administrators can define what modifications are permissible via the driver_updatable_subnet_metadata configuration option. This improvement enables better network isolation and segmentation, ensuring that different data sets or applications are separated in different subnets to reduce the risk of lateral movement within the network if a breach occurs.
- Within Octavia, users can now use custom Neutron security groups with Octavia Amphora load balancer VIP ports. By associating specific security groups with the load balancer's VIP (Virtual IP) ports, you can ensure that only specific types of traffic are allowed to reach the load balancer, reducing the risk of unauthorized access.
Improve Hardware Enablement
- Ironic has added a new interface to support the deployment of bootc container images directly to a host with no intermediate steps. This reduces complexity and makes the deployment process more streamlined, improving hardware utilization by allowing more flexibility in how hardware resources are provisioned.
- Nova's PCI pass-through feature now supports new kernel vfio-PCI variant drivers such as Nvidia GRID on Ubuntu 24.04. Operators can now create instances using those specific PCI devices and also live-migrate them, which strengthens OpenStack's ability to support AI workloads.
***For a more detailed list of Epoxy release features, please see the release highlights.**
"OpenStack's continued momentum—fueled by its proven reliability, active community, and integration with emerging technologies—demonstrates its vital role in today's evolving cloud infrastructure landscape," said Thierry Carrez, general manager of the OpenInfra Foundation. "As organizations look to build local capacity, seek alternatives to proprietary virtualization platforms, or prepare for AI-driven workloads, OpenStack stands out as a flexible, production-ready solution that meets the moment."
"Every OpenStack release is a testament to the dedication and expertise of our global community," said Goutham Pacha Ravi, chair of the OpenStack Technical Committee. "Epoxy reflects thousands of hours of thoughtful collaboration—from new feature development to rigorous testing—that ensures OpenStack remains scalable, secure and ready for modern workloads. It's inspiring to see contributors from so many backgrounds work together to push open infrastructure forward."
Simplification of OpenStack Upgrades
In 2022, the OpenStack community adopted the Skip Level Upgrade Release Process (SLURP), which enables users to upgrade once a year rather than every six months. The previous SLURP release (2024.1 Caracal) was issued in April 2024. Caracal users are able to upgrade directly to the new 2025.1 Epoxy release.
The next OpenStack release, 2025.2 Flamingo, is projected to be released October 1, 2025.
Learn More: Watch OpenInfra Live Tomorrow
At 14:00 UTC (9 a.m. CT) tomorrow, Thursday, April 3, OpenInfra Live will be dedicated to OpenStack 2025.1 Epoxy. The discussion will feature:
- Goutham Pacha Ravi, chair, Technical Committee
- Carlos Silva, project team lead, Manila
- René Ribaud, project team lead, Nova, for OpenStack 2025.2 Flamingo
- Sylvain Bauza, project team lead, Nova, for OpenStack 2025.1 Epoxy
- Riccardo Pittau, project team lead, Ironic
Jeremy Stanley, senior principal engineer for the OpenInfra Foundation, OpenStack community manager and OpenDev Collaboratory sysadmin will moderate the session. You can tune in live or watch it later on demand.
***Learn more about OpenStack and its ecosystem of supporting organizations as well as other software projects supported by the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra Foundation): Kata Containers, StarlingX and Zuul.***
About the Open Infrastructure Foundation
The OpenInfra Foundation builds communities who write open source infrastructure software that runs in production. With the support of over 110,000 individuals in 187 countries, the OpenInfra Foundation hosts open source projects and communities of practice, including infrastructure for AI, container-native apps, edge computing and datacenter clouds. Join the OpenInfra movement: www.openinfra.org
Media Contacts:
Robert Cathey
Cathey Communications for the OpenInfra Foundation
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OpenInfra Foundation
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