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September 20, 2025

Stackers Network Digest — September 20, 2025

25 threads · 42 messages · openstack-announce, openstack-discuss

The Big Picture

The 2026.1 "Gazpacho" leadership slate is set. Polls closed on September 17, and Slawek Kaplonski published PTL results across 34 project teams plus four new Technical Committee members — Sylvain Bauza, Jens Harbott, Tony Breeds, and Doug Goldstein. With Gazpacho governance in place and Flamingo entering release week R-1 (Sep 22–26), attention is pivoting to the October 27–31 virtual PTG: Kendall Nelson confirmed the team list covering most major services plus Kata Containers and StarlingX, and etherpads are already opening for topic collection.

Releases & Announcements

The 2026.1 PTL roster has familiar faces continuing — Rene Ribaud (Uggla) for Nova, Brian Haley for Neutron, Jon Bernard for Cinder, Takashi Kajinami for Heat (and Puppet OpenStack and Storlets), Cyril Roelandt for Glance — alongside new appointees like Mauricio Harley taking Barbican and Omer Schwartz on Designate. Tatiana Ovchinnikova won the contested Horizon race (full tally on CIVS). Several smaller teams — Vitrage, Venus, and Monasca among them — went without candidates and will be handled via TC appointment.

On the TC front, the four winning candidates join the body alongside continuing members. Goutham Pacha Ravi's R-2 weekly summary confirms most cycle-with-rc deliverables have cut their first release candidates, with project teams now testing and fixing release blockers. A community goal to migrate from utf8mb3 to utf8mb4 in MariaDB is being scoped (see Development below).

Tatiana Ovchinnikova has the Horizon Gazpacho PTG etherpad open for topic collection.

Development & Technical Decisions

The week's most consequential technical thread is Takashi Kajinami's status check on ply, the lex/yacc Python library that underpins yaql, which in turn powers user-facing templating in Heat and Mistral. The upstream ply author has declared no further releases and suggests projects vendor the code. Three options are on the table: vendor ply into yaql (the author's suggested path, complicated by a missing LICENSE file in the ply repo despite BSD-3-clause headers), write a new parser, or remove yaql functionality entirely. Heat's usage was largely TripleO-era and could be dropped; Mistral removal would have wider impact. The TC discussed this at its Sep 16 meeting, and a licensing-clarification patch is in flight.

A MySQL/MariaDB charset migration problem is becoming a cross-project concern. MariaDB plans to remove the utf8 alias (which currently maps to utf8mb3), and OpenStack services are inconsistent in how they set charset/collation. The TC is gathering data on per-project usage to scope a potential community goal moving everything to utf8mb4. Ironic has known index-size conflicts with utf8mb4 that would need addressing.

Doug Goldstein opened a needed conversation about Skyline review velocity — both skyline-console and skyline-apiserver have had no non-core contributions merged since June 12, with a backlog including test fixes and 2025.1 backports. With new contributors arriving, he's looking for a path to get this work landing.

In other technical news: Dmitriy Rabotyagov asked for review on an oslo.messaging QManager fix backport for 2025.1; Mohammed Naser is pushing forward on splitting tap-as-a-service into separate server and client packages so consumers don't pull Neutron with the CLI; and Chang Xue traced his Nova API latency regression after upgrading to Caracal to the jsonschema library — downgrading to 3.2.0 removes the latency, suggesting this change and the current jsonschema >4.0 floor warrant a second look.

Heads Up / Action Needed

  • Flamingo final release lands the week of Sep 22–26 (R-1). Treat any remaining patches as release-critical only.
  • PTG (Oct 27–31) team list is locked. If your team isn't on it, email ptg@openinfra.dev immediately. Moderators will soon be contacted to reserve slots via PTGBot; register free at ptg.openinfra.org.
  • OpenStack Charms still needs a PTL — Felipe Reyes has volunteered to step up but the appointment is pending TC action.
  • Ops Radio Hour on September 26 at 1300 UTC will cover Swift compliance processes; agenda items welcome on the etherpad.

Community & Events

Operator threads this week stayed close to fundamentals. William Muriithi asked for practical Ceph DB/WAL sizing guidance for an 18-HDD-OSD cluster with two 800GB SSDs available — the kind of sizing question the Ceph hardware recommendations leave ambiguous. Joel McLean offered a detailed diagnostic checklist for stuck live migrations (NUMA pinning, vif-plug waits, PCI passthrough markings) referencing the NUMA-aware live-migration spec and QEMU's analyze-migration.py tooling.

Shubham Yadav reported a VPNaaS regression on 2024.2 Dalmatian where a second IPSec site connection on the same router hangs in PENDING_CREATE — Neutron's bug deputy reports have similar items open against ML2/OVS and ML2/OVN, so anyone running VPNaaS at scale should keep an eye on it. Kees Meijs asked whether anyone has run Neutron L3 routing with VPP (referencing networking-vpp), and Nguyễn Hữu Khôi continues working through aodh + Prometheus-backed Ceilometer alarms that stay in "insufficient data" state.