OpenStack Deployments Grow as OpenInfra Community Marks 15 Years, Flamingo Release

OpenStack 2025.2 (Flamingo), the 32nd release of the world's most widely deployed open source cloud infrastructure software, is a testament to the open source software's reliability, resilience and worldwide community support.

AUSTIN, Texas, Oct. 1, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The OpenStack community today announced the release of OpenStack 2025.2 (Flamingo), the 32nd version of the world's most widely deployed open source cloud infrastructure software. The milestone comes as deployments are estimated to exceed 55 million cores in production worldwide, underscoring OpenStack's role as a reliable, resilient and innovative foundation for digital infrastructure.

According to the early analysis from the 2025 OpenStack User Survey, OpenStack adoption continues to accelerate across industries. More than 55 million cores are estimated to be in production globally, with thousands of users ranging from emerging startups to the world's largest enterprises. Several "mega-users" operate one million or more cores, including Walmart, Workday and CERN, but the largest growth in OpenStack deployment is seen among small and medium sized businesses (SMBs). Market research estimates the OpenStack market at $22.81 billion in 2024, growing to $91.44 billion by 2029 at a CAGR of 32 percent, driven by its role as a VMware alternative and its proven ability to support artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and high performance computing (HPC) workloads.

"OpenStack adoption is bigger than ever and still growing rapidly, because individuals and organizations around the world continue to pour into the code, the community and the ecosystem," said Thierry Carrez, general manager of the OpenInfra Foundation. "OpenStack is a shining example of open source at its best: a global community delivering critical, stable and reliable infrastructure software for everyone to use, while constantly evolving to support new use cases and workloads. No single organization could achieve this alone."

Around 480 contributors from organizations including Ericsson, Rackspace, Red Hat, Walmart, BBC R&D, Samsung SDS, SAP, and NVIDIA collaborated over six months to build Flamingo. With an increase in activity and contributors, Flamingo introduces almost 8,000 changes as OpenStack continues to power advancement and innovation all over the world.

Flamingo Release Highlights

The Flamingo release reflects the OpenStack community's long-term commitment to resilience and modernization. Highlights include:

• Technical debt reduction: Major progress in eliminating OpenStack's reliance on Eventlet, moving to modern Python asynchronous frameworks. During Flamingo's cycle, Ironic, Mistral, Barbican and Heat completed migrations, while Nova and Neutron made significant progress. With nine other projects currently in progress, this work ensures sustainability for the next 15 years.
• Expanded security and confidential computing: Nova adds one-time-use passthrough devices and AMD SEV-ES support; Magnum enables Kubernetes cluster credential rotation; Manila allows bring-your-own encryption keys; Horizon introduces QR-codes for TOTP authentication setup.
• Flexible release cadence: Flamingo is a six-month "non-SLURP" release, designed for operators who want faster upgrades between the community's annual SLURP releases. The next SLURP release, OpenStack 2026.1 (Gazpacho), is scheduled for April 2026.

"In Flamingo, the community has made enormous progress in Eventlet migration, work that has been in motion for several release cycles," said Goutham Pacha Ravi, chair of the OpenStack Technical Committee. "I could not be prouder of the persistence and collaboration that made this progress possible. By paying down this technical debt, we have strengthened OpenStack for the next 15 years and beyond. OpenStack is here for the long run, and I want to congratulate the entire community for reaching this significant milestone together."

Availability

• The OpenStack Flamingo release is available for download now.
• Detailed release highlights are available here.
• Learn more about the release features directly from OpenStack community leaders in an episode of OpenInfra Live on Thursday, October 2, at 9 a.m. CT.

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 OpenInfra 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. The OpenInfra Foundation is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. Join the OpenInfra movement: www.openinfra.org

Media Contacts:
Robert Cathey
Cathey.co for the OpenInfra Foundation
e: [email protected] 

Allison Price
OpenInfra Foundation
e: [email protected] 

SOURCE OpenInfra Foundation