OpenStack Hibiscus Strengthens Trusted Infrastructure for the AI Era

OpenStack 2026.2 (Hibiscus), the latest OpenStack release, advances confidential computing and security while expanding support for accelerated, high-performance workloads and improving infrastructure efficiency at scale.

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The OpenStack community today announced the release of OpenStack 2026.2 (Hibiscus), the 34th release of the world's most widely deployed open source cloud infrastructure software. OpenStack allows organizations to provide and control the infrastructure layer of the open source AI stack, turning heterogeneous hardware into programmable compute, storage and networking resources.

Hibiscus strengthens OpenStack as trusted infrastructure for increasingly demanding workloads, with advancements in confidential computing and security, expanded support for AI and HPC infrastructure, and improvements that help operators use resources more efficiently at scale.

***The OpenStack Hibiscus release is available for download.***

Community Investment Grows Alongside Security Focus

OpenStack remains one of the world's most active open source infrastructure projects, with trusted infrastructure backed by an open development process designed to continuously build, test and secure the software. Around 600 contributors collaborated during the six-month Hibiscus development cycle, a 21% increase from OpenStack 2026.1 Gazpacho, delivering 11,500 code changes, a 28% increase release over release.

Development across OpenStack is supported by extensive automated testing. During the Hibiscus development cycle, the OpenDev Zuul continuous integration system ran approximately 1.6 million jobs to build, test and publish software across the OpenStack ecosystem. Over the past five years, Zuul has run more than 14.2 million jobs supporting OpenStack development.

Security is similarly a community-wide effort. OpenStack, like many other open source projects, has had an influx of contributions from security researchers: 40 OpenStack Security Advisories (OSSAs) issued so far this year along with 13 OpenStack Security Notes (OSSNs). As always, the OpenStack Vulnerability Management team ensures that security issues are handled punctually and responsibly.

Together, continuous automated testing, open vulnerability management and human review provide multiple layers of accountability throughout the development process.

Hibiscus Release Highlights

The Hibiscus release includes enhancements across OpenStack services that strengthen security and trust, expand support for AI and other high-performance workloads, and improve infrastructure efficiency at scale. A key area of investment in Hibiscus is confidential computing, giving organizations new options to protect sensitive workloads even from privileged infrastructure software while maintaining greater control over where and how those workloads run.

Trusted & Secure Infrastructure

• Nova expands confidential computing support with AMD SEV-SNP and Intel TDX, providing hardware-backed memory encryption, stronger workload isolation and attestation for sensitive workloads.
• Designate strengthens DNS security with enhanced cross-tenant isolation, stronger authentication and support for TLSA/DANE, while adding new tooling to help operators prepare for post-quantum cryptography.
• Cyborg strengthens security and tenant isolation for accelerator resources, with tighter access controls and hardware management protections designed for multi-tenant environments.

Infrastructure for AI & Compute-Intensive Workloads

• Nova and Cyborg expand support for accelerated workloads by enabling OpenStack to manage mediated devices such as vGPUs, giving operators greater flexibility in how accelerator resources are provided and managed.
• Manila adds support for Weka and Lustre parallel filesystems, expanding high-performance storage options for data-intensive AI, machine learning and HPC workloads.
• Ironic and Nova improve bare-metal resource tracking, enabling more efficient management of the specialized and heterogeneous compute increasingly used for AI, HPC and other demanding workloads.

Efficient Infrastructure at Scale

• Watcher improves infrastructure utilization by making workload consolidation more responsive to both real-time usage and reserved capacity, while expanding automation options for managing unused resources.
• Neutron significantly improves networking efficiency at scale, including a more than 15x reduction in the memory footprint of HA router monitoring.
• Glance improves image distribution and management with parallel image imports, preferred-store downloads and expanded cache management capabilities, helping operators move and manage images more efficiently across large-scale infrastructure.

For a more detailed list of Hibiscus release features, please see the release highlights.

"AI is raising the requirements on the infrastructure that organizations need to run. They need to be able to provide the specialized compute these workloads demand, while maintaining stronger control over how that infrastructure is operated, secured and trusted. OpenStack Hibiscus advances both sides of that equation, with stronger support for accelerated and high-performance workloads alongside improvements in confidential computing, workload isolation and security. For 17 years, the OpenStack community has continued to evolve the software as infrastructure requirements change, while giving organizations the control to run demanding workloads on their own terms." — Thierry Carrez, general manager, OpenInfra Foundation

"What stands out in Hibiscus is that the OpenStack community is evolving both the infrastructure and how we build it. Investment in AI and HPC capabilities is happening alongside deeper security work that is strengthening not only our code, but the processes behind it. Contributors are also exploring how AI-assisted development can help us innovate faster while keeping human creativity and accountability at the center. We're approaching these changes the way OpenStack always has: openly, collaboratively and by building community consensus." — Goutham Pacha Ravi, Chair, OpenStack Technical Committee

Simplifying Upgrades with the SLURP Process

OpenStack Hibiscus is a non-SLURP (Skip Level Upgrade Release Process) release. Introduced in 2022, the SLURP model enables operators to upgrade once per year rather than every six months, simplifying long-term operations while maintaining OpenStack's predictable release cadence.

The previous SLURP release, 2026.1 Gazpacho, was issued in April 2026. Operators running that release can opt to skip the upgrade to Hibiscus and update directly to the next OpenStack release, 2027.1 (Indri), which is expected in March 2027.

Learn More: OpenInfra Live Session

To learn more about the Hibiscus release, OpenStack community leaders will discuss the new features and development work in an upcoming OpenInfra Live episode.

OpenInfra Live — Hibiscus Overview
October 1, 2026 — 14:00 UTC
Panelists: Jay Faulkner (VMT), Goutham Pacha Ravi (OpenStack Technical Committee), Carlos Silva (Manila), Douglas Viroel (Watcher), Doug Goldstein (Ironic), Dmitriy Rabotyagov (Freezer), Brian Haley (Neutron), Rene Ribaud (Nova) 

About the OpenInfra Foundation

The OpenInfra Foundation builds communities who write open source infrastructure software that runs in production. With the support of over 110,000 individuals in 187 countries, the OpenInfra Foundation hosts open source projects and communities of practice, including infrastructure for AI, container-native apps, edge computing and datacenter clouds. The OpenInfra Foundation is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. Join the OpenInfra movement: www.openinfra.org

Media Contacts

Robert Cathey
Cathey Communications for the OpenInfra Foundation
[email protected]

Allison Price
OpenInfra Foundation
[email protected]

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SOURCE OpenInfra Foundation