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September 27, 2025

Stackers Network Digest — September 27, 2025

38 threads · 70 messages · openstack-discuss

The Big Picture

This was Flamingo release week. After a full cycle of work, the community closed out final release candidates for 2025.2 Flamingo, OpenStack's 32nd release, scheduled to land October 1. The new TC was being re-formed — election results in, chair and liaison roles to fill — and the committee was making hard calls about leaderless projects. Underneath the release machinery, a thoughtful retrospective on contributor turnout in OpenStack elections set up several PTG conversations to come, while operators tackled real-world upgrade pain (Caracal → Epoxy, including a gnarly RabbitMQ jump).

Heads Up / Action Needed

Release countdown R+0. Thierry Carrez's countdown for the cycle-with-rc projects targeted October 1 coordinated release.

Caracal → Epoxy upgrade trip report. Eugen Block shared a detailed and very useful debrief from upgrading production cloud Caracal → Epoxy plus Ubuntu 22.04 → 24.04. Two landmines: - RabbitMQ 3.9 → 3.12 could only be done by reducing to one rabbit host, stepping through 3.10 → 3.11 (enabling the required feature flags) under Jammy with podman, then upgrading the OS to Noble for the packaged 3.12. - nova-manage db sync failed against MariaDB with Incorrect definition of table mysql.column_stats (their DB was ~10 years old); mysql_upgrade check-if-upgrade-is-needed fixed it. A stray podman-created .local/share/containers/storage/ directory inside /var/lib/mysql also tripped mysql_upgrade and is worth checking.

He references the database password-hash thread and Neutron bug 2112492 with patch 961483 for the full upgrade context.

Outreachy CFP for Dec 2025 cohort — Dmitry Tantsur asked for mentor/project submissions by September 26 at outreachy.org. Only one intern can be funded this round, but more proposals help.

Open Source Pavilion booking for OpenInfra Summit Europe — projects, SIGs, and pop-up teams can grab time via this form.

Governance & Community

Election retrospective. Goutham Pacha Ravi opened a frank thread on participation: 78 of 173 eligible voters cast ballots in the 2026.1 TC election — out of over 650 identified active contributors in the one-year window. Root causes: an OIF Individual Membership renewal pulse that lost contributors who missed the email; CIVS ballot opt-in confusion; widespread misunderstanding that you need to be an OIF Individual (not Community) member to vote. The TC is gathering ideas to fix all three, including possibly requiring buy-in from the OpenInfra Foundation Board and staff for procedural changes. Jeremy Stanley plans a deeper analysis.

TC weekly summary (R-1) — election results in: Tony Breeds (tonyb) joins, with Doug Goldstein (cardoe), Jens Harbott (frickler), and Sylvain Bauza (bauzas) returning. 34 PTLs were appointed, including first-time PTL Arnaud Morin (Mistral) and returning PTL Li Liu (Cyborg, last PTL'd at Stein). A community goal to standardize database character sets and collations is moving forward. The TC plans to dedicate the first two days of the PTG to wider cross-project discussions.

Leaderless projects: the TC is publicly seeking PTL volunteers for Vitrage, Venus, and OpenStack Charms. Without volunteers the alternatives are switching to Distributed Project Leadership, marking the team inactive, or retirement. Felipe Reyes confirmed willingness to PTL the Charms project (similar to his previous self-appointment).

Refactoring ops-related activities. Thierry Carrez proposed a PTG session on October 31 16:00 UTC to consolidate the fragmented operator-facing groups (Ops meetup / Large Scale SIG / Public Cloud SIG / Scientific SIG) under one banner — all of them overlap, all struggle for volunteers, all suffer for discoverability.

Flamingo OpenInfra Live scheduled for October 2 14:00 UTC. Allison Price was still recruiting PTL/TC presenters at week's end.

Development & Technical Decisions

Skyline patch backlog and release strategy. Goutham Pacha Ravi kicked off a focused discussion on getting Skyline back to a sustainable cadence: pending merges and backports on skyline-apiserver and skyline-console, and how to share workload beyond a single individual or company. Several follow-up patches and a TC meeting agenda reference were cited.

Watcher does not consider server-group affinity policies. Nguyễn Hữu Khôi confirmed that Watcher's current data model doesn't include server-group constraints when generating optimization actions. The extend-compute-model-attributes spec and watcher patch 955827 are the threads to follow; operators should set the audit-template strict scope in the API ref as a workaround.

Neutron port-notifications broadcast on oslo.messaging. Arnaud Morin's view: notifications today go to topic queues (classic/quorum with at-most-one delivery); supporting fanout queues / streams for multiple consumers isn't currently in oslo.messaging but isn't a huge change for a POC. See the docs.

Kolla swift support reinstatement for 2025.2 — Olivier Chaze backed the effort, noting they'd move "double-digit petabyte" Swift clusters to Kolla-Ansible if support returns.

Nova memory release fix — Nguyễn Hữu Khôi confirmed Sean Mooney's patch addressing qemu memory release behavior is working as expected; it's slated for 2025.2.

Nova API call duration regression on Caracal — Tobias Urdin and Chang are debugging at bug 2121607.

Operator Notes

PTG-Adjacent Activity

Iury Gregory opened cross-project session requests for Ironic with Neutron (VXLAN attachments), and Nova + Cinder (Graphical Console, NVMe-over-TCP). Richard Bachmann (CERN) called a LinuxBridge-to-OVN outreach sync tied to the upcoming summit. The Large Scale SIG met September 24; the Ops Radio Hour ran September 26. Bence Romsics' Neutron bug-deputy report (week 38) highlighted multi-GW-port L3 router issues (bug 2124252) and a router-gateway HA chassis binding bug (2124269) needing assignees.