The Big Picture

This was release week. OpenStack 2026.1 "Gazpacho" shipped on April 1st — and yes, the release team went out of their way to confirm it wasn't an April Fool's joke. With the final tags cut, the openstack/releases repository is now open for 2026.2 "Hibiscus", all freezes are lifted, and stable/2026.1 is a normal stable branch under standard stable policy. Around that milestone, the week's traffic split between celebration, a couple of meaty upgrade-pain reports from operators, and early jockeying for the April 20-24 PTG. Notably, there were no security advisories this week.

Releases & Announcements

Előd Illés announced the final Gazpacho releases on behalf of Release Management, pointing to the new release site at releases.openstack.org/gazpacho and again noting growth in both contributor count and merged changes this cycle. The community marked the occasion with OpenInfra Live episodes on April 2 (a cross-team highlights panel from the TC, Nova, Manila, Watcher and Ironic) and a Ironic deep-dive scheduled for April 9. Several teams paused routine work to mark the release — Cinder cancelled its Friday festival of reviews (for this week only), and Nova, Neutron CI, and Keystone all cancelled meetings.

Development & Technical Decisions

A broken translation gate drew the most discussion. Jan Jasek reported that propose-translation-update has been failing since pkg_resources was deprecated and removed from setuptools, because the enmerkar library still imports it. The job lives in project-config and runs shell scripts directly, so Horizon's local tox.ini fix doesn't apply. The thread weighed three imperfect options: hardcoding setuptools<82 in the Zuul job, patching the apparently-unmaintained enmerkar library themselves, or a requirements-side fix that doesn't actually work. No clean resolution yet — this is an active discussion worth following for anyone maintaining Horizon plugins or translations.

Confidential computing momentum for Hibiscus. The Intel TDX thread firmed up: Anton Iacobaeus confirmed bandwidth to develop the TDX implementation this cycle and will introduce the draft spec at the PTG. René Ribaud is pushing to line up AMD SEV-SNP support in parallel, calling both a priority for his employer. The TDX spec depends on the still-in-review generalize-sev-code blueprint.

A new project pitch: Nick Barcet floated launching "OpenClaw as a service on OpenStack" — work by Tensormesh (behind the LMCache project) to deploy OpenClaw instances on-demand via an OpenStack control plane — and asked whether the community would welcome it as an OpenStack project. Early-stage; a conversation starter rather than a decision.

Cleanup continues. Jay Faulkner confirmed Ironic stakeholders agreed to move forward with retiring the legacy iLO driver (alongside already-queued iRMC and SNMP removals), and Vladimir Kozhukalov removed the unused metacontroller and daemonjob-controller charts from OpenStack-Helm after no objections.

Heads Up / Action Needed

Two operator upgrade-pain reports deserve attention because they may be early signals of regressions, not just local misconfigurations:

• Nova-api CPU climb after Caracal→Epoxy (RDO). Federica Fanzago reported steadily increasing CPU on controllers a couple of days after upgrading, with nova-api the top consumer and operations like listing flavors slowing dramatically. Running nova 31.0.0 from RDO. No root cause identified in-thread — if you've upgraded to Epoxy on RDO, compare notes.
• The translation gate is red for projects using enmerkar; expect failing propose-translation-update jobs until a fix lands.

With freezes lifted, this is also the moment to retarget feature work and specs at Hibiscus and to get PTG topics onto team etherpads before April 20.

Community & Events

PTG prep ramped up across the lists. René Ribaud ran a test-run Nova bug-triage meeting on April 1 (15:30-16:00 UTC) to gauge interest in a recurring slot. The Ops Radio Hour recap from March 27 (via Ildikó Vancsa) captured useful operator sentiment: broadly positive experiences with OVN, but clear demand for better OVS-to-OVN migration tooling without downtime, more exploration of OVN-IC and cells support, and growing interest in observability metrics like CPU steal. The next Ops Radio Hour is folded into the PTG on April 24 at 1300 UTC. On the metrics front, Ildikó reported incremental LFX Insights progress — the commits widget is now populated and review-activity and repo-to-project-team mapping are tracked as GitHub issues — a partial answer to the contributor frustration aired in prior weeks.

A reminder for newcomers running into trouble: a couple of "404 error" threads from people testing DevStack/MicroStack went largely unanswered, a perennial reminder that the lists skew toward developer and operator topics over first-run install support.