OpenStack 2025.2 “Flamingo”: Strengthening the Foundation of Open Cloud for the Next 15 Years
The OpenStack community has officially released OpenStack 2025.2 (Flamingo) — the 32nd version of the world’s most widely deployed open-source cloud infrastructure platform. The milestone reaffirms OpenStack’s reputation for reliability, resilience, and global community strength, as it continues to serve as a cornerstone of open digital infrastructure.
According to early data from the 2025 OpenStack User Survey, global OpenStack deployments have now surpassed 55 million cores in production — a figure that reflects its continued momentum across industries and company sizes. While large-scale users like Walmart, Workday, and CERN still account for massive clusters running over a million cores each, the fastest growth is now happening among small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) adopting OpenStack for cost-efficient, scalable private clouds.
The open-source cloud market’s expansion mirrors this adoption trend: industry research projects OpenStack’s total market value to grow from $22.8 billion in 2024 to $91.4 billion by 2029, driven by an estimated 32% CAGR. The platform’s evolution as a vendor-neutral VMware alternative — combined with its proven ability to power AI, ML, and HPC workloads — positions OpenStack as one of the most strategic technologies for modern infrastructure.
A Global Collaboration Behind Flamingo
Over the course of six months, around 480 contributors from organizations such as Ericsson, Rackspace, Red Hat, Samsung SDS, SAP, NVIDIA, Walmart and Cloudification worked together to bring Flamingo to life.
The result: nearly 8,000 code changes, numerous feature upgrades, and major technical debt reduction — all reinforcing OpenStack’s long-term maintainability.
Key Highlights from the Flamingo Release
Reducing Technical Debt & Modernizing the Core
One of Flamingo’s most significant achievements is progress in phasing out Eventlet, an aging Python concurrency framework, in favor of modern asynchronous frameworks.
During this cycle, Ironic, Mistral, Barbican, and Heat completed the migration, while Nova and Neutron made substantial strides toward full removal.
This shift future-proofs OpenStack’s codebase, ensuring its sustainability and performance well into the next decade.
Security & Confidential Computing Advancements
Flamingo adds multiple new security-oriented features:
- Nova introduces one-time-use passthrough devices and support for AMD SEV-ES, improving hardware-level isolation.
- Magnum now enables Kubernetes cluster credential rotation, enhancing cluster lifecycle security.
- Manila adds the ability to use bring-your-own encryption keys for storage backends.
- Horizon, the OpenStack dashboard, gains QR-code support for TOTP two-factor authentication setup.
These enhancements continue OpenStack’s focus on confidential computing and operational security, helping operators meet modern compliance and data-protection demands.
Flexible Release Cadence
Flamingo follows a six-month, non-SLURP release model — ideal for operators who prefer more frequent incremental updates between annual “SLURP” long-term upgrade cycles.
The next SLURP release, OpenStack 2026.1 (Gazpacho), is scheduled for April 2026, continuing this predictable rhythm that balances agility with stability.
Nova 32.0.0 Highlights
At the core of Flamingo is Nova 32.0.0, introducing several key compute-service improvements:
- New API Microversion v2.100: Expands Nova’s REST capabilities and client interactions.
- Enhanced Guest Metadata: Additional flavor and image metadata are now embedded directly into libvirt guest XML, improving observability and debugging.
- Experimental Native Threading Mode: A new concurrency option for nova-conductor, providing a pathway away from Eventlet while boosting potential performance and scalability.
- Improved Error Handling: Clean handling of live migration prechecks ensures instances no longer enter error states unnecessarily.
Together, these refinements make Nova more efficient, observable, and resilient, aligning perfectly with the community’s modernization goals.
A Release That Builds the Future
The Flamingo release doesn’t reinvent OpenStack — it strengthens it. With a more sustainable architecture, robust security features, and an ever-growing user base, OpenStack 2025.2 reaffirms its position as the leading open-source foundation for private and hybrid clouds.
At Cloudification, we’re excited to see how Flamingo’s progress — particularly around security enhancements, and observability — contributes to even greater stability in OpenStack-based platforms. These improvements align with our ongoing work on c12n, our OpenStack-powered private cloud solution, which emphasizes flexibility, performance, and long-term support.
For organizations seeking freedom from vendor lock-in and a reliable foundation for their cloud strategy, OpenStack 2025.2 “Flamingo” represents another confident step forward in the evolution of open infrastructure.
