The Big Picture

This was the deep holiday week — between Christmas and New Year — and traffic on openstack-discuss reflected it. The standout development wasn't a release or a CVE but a community-wide milestone: Hervé Beraud's year-end retrospective on the Eventlet Removal Initiative, which reported that more than 61% of impacted deliverables have shown significant progress, with twenty fully migrated. The rest of the week was a mix of operator questions, project housekeeping ahead of the break, and a string of meeting cancellations. The TC noted it merged no significant changes and confirmed that combined PTL and TC elections will run in February.

Development & Technical Decisions

Eventlet removal hit a decisive milestone. Hervé Beraud's "Thank you for 2025" post is the most consequential read of the week. Two years into the effort to move OpenStack off eventlet, the numbers are concrete: over 61% of impacted deliverables showing significant progress, 20 fully migrated, 40 actively in flight, and 424+ Gerrit patches in 2025 alone. Ironic, Heat, Barbican, and Mistral are now fully migrated; Neutron is one step from completing its migration; Nova can run specific services in threading mode; and Cinder, Designate, Watcher, and Cyborg show sustained momentum. Supporting pieces matured too: eventlet itself gained Python 3.12/3.13/3.14 support, oslo.service introduced a fully threading-based backend, and Cotyledon is progressing on new spawning methods. This remains a flagship cross-project effort heading into 2026.

Designate multi-region NS-record restriction. Sylvain continued (from earlier December) probing why Designate blocks updating the NS recordset on a root zone ("Updating a root zone NS record is not allowed"), which prevents him from listing all three regional nameservers in a PRIMARY/SECONDARY setup across three independent deployments. He's asking whether the long-standing restriction could be made configurable via policy or a flag. Still an open question.

Heartbeat / RabbitMQ ping checks. The cross-project thread (Nova, Cinder, Neutron) on improving the service heartbeat to verify the main thread actually responds to a RabbitMQ ping drew an important real-world caution: Arnaud Morin noted this resembles the existing rpc_ping_enabled mechanism his team ran in production for years but eventually disabled — it generated a lot of RabbitMQ traffic and still didn't catch all cases, since a single ping-handling thread could stay healthy while other (green) threads were stuck or dead. A useful warning for anyone reviving the idea.

Heads Up / Action Needed

• February elections coming. The TC's R-15 summary confirmed that combined PTL and TC elections will be conducted in February, with Ian Y Choi and Slawek Kaplonski continuing as election officials (Tony Breeds as TC liaison). Details to follow.
• Unmaintained branch cleanup. The TC reached consensus leaning toward deleting unmaintained branches through Yoga, and also dropping Zed, while seeking clarification from the unmaintained-core team on the opt-in maintenance model for newer branches.
• Testing/infra notes. Ceph Tentacle is now being tested with DevStack; Michal Nasiadka is working on getting an x86-v3 build of OVS installed on AlmaLinux (pursuing a packaging fix upstream) — important for keeping RPM-based testing viable across cloud providers with older hardware.
• Watch the noise. A "SECURITY BUG" thread from "Umbrella Corporation" was a bounty-seeking message, not a real advisory.

Community & Events

Most teams were on holiday hiatus. The week's tangible community offering was SnapSentry, a new MIT-licensed Go tool (Aravindh Murugesan) to automate Cinder snapshot lifecycle management — scheduling and rotation, which Cinder itself leaves to operators. It's metadata-driven, snapshots all of a VM's attached volumes in parallel, cleans up orphaned snapshots, and supports restricted application credentials; the author pitched it as a lightweight open-source alternative to commercial tools. On staffing, Alan Bishop's resignation from the puppet-cinder/glance/manila core teams (announced December 29) reduces review capacity on those modules. Operator support threads included a VMware-to-OpenStack 2025.2 production-validation request and a Watcher continuous audit stuck in PENDING.