The Big Picture

With feature freeze for the 2025.2 "Flamingo" release two weeks out (the TC's R-7 summary), this week centered on the run-up: PTL/TC nominations, gate health, and a push to land in-flight features before the door closes. The most consequential developments were a maturing LUKS-based image-encryption series asking Nova for a final review, a hard look at retiring or rescuing aging projects (Metalsmith and Vitrage), and an early steer on the 2026.1 "Gazpacho" runtimes — Python 3.13 on Debian 13 (Trixie). Operators, meanwhile, kept surfacing upgrade-era regressions across Nova, Keystone, Neutron VPNaaS, and Cinder.

Releases & Announcements

Elõd Illés posted the R-6 release countdown as Flamingo entered its final weeks. The TC's R-7 summary confirmed feature freeze for cycle-with-rc projects is set for August 28, with nominations for PTL and four TC seats closing August 20.

Looking ahead, the TC gave an early read on the 2026.1 "Gazpacho" runtimes: Debian 13 (Trixie) ships with Python 3.13, a key input to the supported-Python decision, and initial smoke tests on a Trixie devstack-integration job look promising. Teams should expect the runtime baseline to move accordingly and plan tech-debt work (notably eventlet removal) to match.

Development & Technical Decisions

The headline feature push was Josephine Seifert's LUKS-based image encryption. The Cinder and Glance patches are in good shape with tempest tests, and the team needs review on a single remaining Nova patch (change 926326) that handles whether encryption keys are used directly or hexlified first. Landing it would complete a long-running, security-relevant feature — a good target for Nova reviewers before freeze.

Two threads framed the lifecycle of struggling projects. Jay Faulkner proposed retiring Metalsmith and excluding it from Flamingo: it has carried a "maintenance mode" notice for nearly two years, CI no longer passes, and there are no engaged upstream users or invested maintainers. Separately, Takashi Kajinami dug into Vitrage's broken tempest gate and surfaced three root causes — use of removed oslo_context.RequestContext interfaces (an easy fix), reliance on asyncore modules from pysnmp-lextudio that vanished with Python 3.12's removal of asyncore (the hardest, needing a careful asyncio migration), and consistently failing tempest tests. He CC'd the TC, flagging that Vitrage needs hands beyond his own. Both threads feed directly into the broader governance question of which projects can sustainably continue into 2026.1.

Operators reported a string of concrete issues. Chang Xue's most-discussed thread documented Nova API call duration steadily climbing after a Bobcat-to-Caracal upgrade — response times growing from ~80-90 ms at restart to over 500 ms after ~10 days, across os-quota-sets and servers/detail, and not resolved by switching from the new UnifiedLimitsDriver back to DbQuotaDriver. The accumulating nature points at a possible leak or cache-growth regression and drew several participants but no definitive fix. Marc Vorwerk reported Keystone (2024.1, 25.0.1, Kolla-Ansible) flooding logs with ~18k/day TokenNotFound errors with mismatched InvalidToken messages downstream. Shubham Yadav reported an apparent Dalmatian VPNaaS regression: a second IPsec site connection on the same VPN service/router stays stuck in PENDING_CREATE with no rendering or strongSwan activity, while reverting only the L3-agent container to a Zed image makes it work immediately. Karl Kloppenborg hit volume retype failures ("disk does not have active block job") when migrating between storage backends with libvirt/Nova. Eugen Block chased a Horizon "service type block-storage not activated" warning on an upgraded Epoxy cloud. Balazs Gibizer opened a discussion on how Nova compute should react to unmanaged VMs on a host.

On the storage-and-backup front, Nguyễn Hữu Khôi lamented the lack of a complete OpenStack backup solution — Cinder backup can't schedule or show progress, and Freezer and Raksha appear abandoned, leaving many to roll their own with Ceph snapshots and rbd export. The IBM SVf (Cinder) callhome thread reached resolution: after Sean Mooney flagged GDPR concerns, IBM agreed to stop capturing OS-release data (keeping only host UUID for duplicate-registration detection) and to manage Call Home outside Cinder, clearing the patch for review.

Community & Events

The 2026.1 election season opened. The TC's R-7 summary noted PTL and four-seat TC elections kicked off, with nominations closing August 20 (OIF membership required). René Ribaud announced his candidacy to continue as Nova/Placement PTL, citing bug-triage improvements and participation in the eventlet-removal effort as priorities. Jay Faulkner confirmed Ironic's liaisons have re-opted into the distributed-project-leadership model, part of a broader cross-project refresh covering Freezer, Watcher, Release, Requirements, and Oslo. Governance also continued the Monasca retirement process and clarified affiliation-diversity language in the TC charter.

Kendall Nelson pushed the "OpenStack for AI" whitepaper: the August 14 meeting recapped the working draft, with content targeted for first draft by September 1 and reference architectures and case studies due September 19 (open to OpenInfra Platinum/Gold/Silver members) ahead of publication at the OpenInfra Summit Europe. Nova, Swift, Cyborg, Keystone, Neutron, Horizon, and Skyline were specifically asked to contribute perspective. Ildiko Vancsa promoted the August 22 Ops Radio Hour (Swift compliance, GPUs, VMware migration, vTPM live migration, a confirmed Keystone security bug 2117217, and consolidating Ops chat onto Matrix). The Public Cloud SIG met on August 13, while Tacker canceled its August 11 meeting for summer vacation.

Heads Up / Action Needed

• Nominate by August 20: PTL and TC (four seats) nominations close; feature freeze follows August 28.
• Nova reviewers: the LUKS image-encryption series needs review on Nova change 926326 to land before freeze.
• Vitrage needs help: broken tempest gate has multiple root causes (oslo_context, pysnmp asyncio migration, failing tests) — the TC has been notified.
• Metalsmith retirement proposed for Flamingo — object now if you still depend on it.
• Whitepaper deadline Sept 19: reference architectures and case studies for the OpenStack-for-AI whitepaper are due (OpenInfra members).
• Gazpacho runtimes: expect Python 3.13 / Debian 13 (Trixie) as the moving baseline; plan accordingly.