The Big Picture

This was a week defined by governance machinery and end-of-cycle housekeeping as the 2025.2 "Flamingo" release entered its final stretch. The combined PTL/TC election season formally opened, the Technical Committee pushed ahead on two retirements (Monasca and RefStack), and the release countdown ticked into week R-7. Underneath the process churn, operators kept the list busy with real-world questions about networking backends, upgrades, and storage drivers — a reminder that the Flamingo feature freeze on August 28 is looming for everyone.

Releases & Announcements

Thierry Carrez posted the release countdown for week R-7, keeping teams focused as Flamingo development winds down. Goutham Pacha Ravi's TC weekly summary (R-8) put a finer point on it: the community is eight weeks from wrapping 2025.2 and three weeks from feature freeze (August 28, 2025). If your project has features still in flight, that deadline is the one to plan around.

On the project-leadership front, the combined PTL/TC election season for the 2026.1 cycle is now open (announced by Slawomir Kaplonski). The nomination period began August 6 at 23:45 UTC. Because of timing, PTL and TC nominations and voting run concurrently this cycle, though on separate ballots. Two things worth repeating: a PTL candidate running unopposed wins by acclaim with no poll, and a TC poll only happens if more than four candidates step forward for the open seats. Critically, candidates and voters must re-establish their individual OpenInfra Foundation memberships or their nominations won't be verified and ballots won't be sent. Don't get caught out by lapsed membership.

The Cinder midcycle/review meeting is set for Monday, August 18, 1400–1600 UTC (Jon Bernard), with the Flamingo midcycle etherpad open for topics.

Development & Technical Decisions

Two retirements advanced. The TC is moving ahead with retiring Monasca; after earlier signals of interest in continued maintenance, the project team is now comfortable with retirement, and the TC will work with the unmaintained-core group to clean up deliverables and branches. Takashi Kajinami noted he intends to remove the Monasca integration from Heat once retirement lands, offering it as an external plugin if anyone still needs it. Separately, Pierre Riteau and Jeremy Stanley confirmed the decommissioning of RefStack and retirement of related repos (interop, refstack, refstack-client) — the service has been unused for trademark qualification since a 2023 board resolution relaxed the requirement.

The TC also kicked off the cyclical DPL (distributed project leadership) refresh: Ghanshyam Maan asked the six DPL-model projects — Freezer, Watcher, Release, Requirements, Oslo, and Ironic — to either opt back in via liaison -1s or plan for a PTL election, with governance reviews already posted for each.

On the technical side, Bence Romsics raised a thoughtful Nova question about unmanaged libvirt VMs co-located with nova-managed ones. The stable-compute-uuid blueprint changed behavior so that nova-compute now refuses to start when it finds an unmanaged VM on first startup (previously a warning), unless the stable compute UUID is pre-generated. The pragmatic guidance for distros that co-locate orchestration VMs is to pre-generate the stable UUID, which is documented and supported; whether Nova should instead inspect libvirt domain metadata is an open design question.

A few notable bug and packaging items: Michael Still flagged that Kolla's Epoxy (2025.1) Debian builds appear to enable the Dalmatian extrepo rather than Epoxy, and offered a patch if it's unintentional. Tobias Urdin reported that pkg_resources breaks with newer Oslo wheels on Python 3.8/3.9 (a setuptools name-normalization corner case) hitting stable-branch CI for the Gnocchi projects, with pinning Oslo versions as the only near-term workaround. Yatin Karel's Neutron bug deputy report showed several OVN agent metadata-extension fixes already released, with one randomly failing functional test (test_ovs_and_ovs_events) still unassigned.

Security

The recurring Cinder "call home" debate continued, and it's worth operators' attention. Brian Rosmaita pushed back on IBM's proposal to add a callhome plugin to the SVf driver enabled by default, drawing a line: Cinder has no precedent for drivers that report to a vendor, and any such feature should be off by default and clearly named. IBM (Vivek Pandey) clarified that its plugin metadata stays local unless the customer explicitly enables Call Home on the backend. The parallel debate over secure secret management in Kolla-Ansible (Barbican/Castellan vs. application credentials vs. Ansible Vault) also carried on, with Mauricio Harley arguing from a defense-in-depth, NIST/ENISA-aligned perspective that protecting the keys that encrypt secrets matters even against root-level compromise.

Heads Up / Action Needed

• Feature freeze for Flamingo is August 28 — three weeks out. Land or defer accordingly.
• Re-establish your OpenInfra Foundation membership now if you intend to run or vote in the PTL/TC elections.
• DPL projects (Freezer, Watcher, Release, Requirements, Oslo, Ironic) must act on the governance reviews to keep the DPL model or move to a PTL election.
• The Neutron drivers meeting on August 8 was canceled (no agenda); open neutron-specs still need review.

Community & Events

Operators dominated the help threads this week with practical, recurring concerns: whether Linux bridge remains usable through Antelope → Caracal → Epoxy upgrades (it's deprecated/experimental, with OVN/OVS the recommended path), integrating Tungsten Fabric with Neutron under Kolla-Ansible 2023.1, Ceph RBD mirroring for multi-AZ DR designs, and using Watcher without Gnocchi/Ceilometer by feeding it Prometheus-format metrics. On the contributor side, openstack-helm nominated Doug Goldstein (cardoe) as a core reviewer, and there was fresh interest in making openstack-helm charts friendlier to GitOps tooling like ArgoCD and Flux. The TC also encouraged folks with architectural insight to join the Foundation's OpenStack-for-AI working group.