OpenStack 2026.1 (Gazpacho) introduces operational improvements, expanded hardware enablement and continued momentum from a global community building open infrastructure.
The OpenStack community announced the release of OpenStack 2026.1 (Gazpacho), the latest version of the world’s most widely deployed open source cloud infrastructure software. The release continues OpenStack’s long-standing tradition of delivering production-ready infrastructure software through open collaboration, while advancing capabilities needed to support modern workloads across private clouds, edge environments and AI-driven infrastructure.
The 33rd OpenStack release reflects an increase in community contributions, underscoring the project’s growing momentum and relevance across the global infrastructure landscape. This release sharpens its focus on operator needs, delivering intelligent automation that reduces manual effort, seamless workload migration across zones and environments, an increasingly critical capability as enterprises accelerate migration from VMware, and the flexibility to run consistently across real-world, heterogeneous infrastructure. Notably, 40% of contributions came from European contributors, highlighting OpenStack’s expanding role as digital sovereignty initiatives drive adoption across this region.
The Gazpacho release reflects continued momentum from the OpenStack community and includes improvements across several core services designed to simplify operations, enhance hardware support and improve the operator experience.
***The OpenStack Gazpacho release is available for download.***
OpenStack Community Continues Global Collaboration
OpenStack remains one of the world’s most active open source infrastructure projects, powered by contributors representing hundreds of organizations worldwide.
During the six-month Gazpacho development cycle:
- Around 500 contributors from 100 organizations collaborated to build the release
- The community delivered 9,000 code changes across OpenStack services
- The OpenDev Zuul CI system continues to run over a million jobs per release cycle in order to build, test, and publish the software.
These contributions reinforce OpenStack’s reputation for stability, transparency and open collaboration across the global infrastructure ecosystem.
Gazpacho Release Highlights
The Gazpacho release includes enhancements across several OpenStack services focused on improving operator usability, supporting modern hardware and enabling more efficient cloud operations.
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OpenStack Ironic Enhances Operator Efficiency through Intelligent Automation
- Autodetect deploy interface removes the need to choose deployment methods manually
- Automatic protocol detection (NFS / CIFS for Redfish) simplifies boot configuration
- Trait-based port scheduling automates network placement based on real infrastructure attributes
- Config + per-node overrides preserve fine-grained operator control
Seamless Workload Migration and Mobility
- In Watcher, cross-zone migration strategies (enhanced testing) improves reliability of workload redistribution
- Live migration with vTPM in Nova enables secure movement of sensitive workloads
- In Ironic, noop deploy interface onboard and track existing workloads without redeploying
Enhanced Operational Flexibility, Security Across Production Environments
- NFS + CIFS/SMB support for virtual media boot in Ironic works across diverse storage backends
- A new driver configuration guide in Cyborg covers all supported accelerator types — FPGA, GPU, NIC, QAT, SSD, and PCI passthrough
- Manila QoS types and specs enforce workload-specific performance policies
- Integration with OpenBao (Vault) for PKI in OpenStack-Ansible align with existing enterprise security tooling
Accelerated Performance and Responsiveness at Scale
- Parallel live migrations in Nova enable faster workload movement by allowing multiple memory transfer connections. This feature has been in high demand from operators seeking a VMware alternative.
- Default IOThread per QEMU instance improves performance by offloading disk I/O from vCPUs
- Asynchronous volume attach API reduces latency and improves responsiveness by decoupling long-running operations from API calls
- Several new capabilities and scalability improvements have been integrated in the Neutron OVN driver, including BGP support, North-South routing for external ports, and allowed address pairs with virtual MAC addresses.
“OpenStack’s continued momentum reflects the strength of its global community and its ability to meet current, real-world infrastructure needs at scale. With the Gazpacho release, we’re seeing significant advances in operational simplicity, workload mobility and hardware flexibility. These capabilities are increasingly critical as organizations modernize their infrastructure, look at freeing themselves from dependency to proprietary platforms and respond to growing demand for AI. OpenStack remains a trusted and mature foundation for building secure, sovereign and adaptable cloud infrastructure.” — Thierry Carrez, general manager, OpenInfra Foundation
“Every OpenStack service delivered meaningful improvements in the Gazpacho release, from parallel live migrations and vTPM support in Nova to autodetect deployment and standalone networking in Ironic, QoS types in Manila, and BGP integration in Neutron’s OVN driver. These advancements build on each other to strengthen OpenStack as a unified platform, not just a collection of projects. It’s a testament to a global community of contributors working in lockstep to solve real operator challenges. Thirty-three releases in, OpenStack continues to evolve, making infrastructure more efficient for today’s workloads and ready for what operators need next.” — Goutham Pacha Ravi, chair, OpenStack Technical Committee
Simplifying Upgrades with the SLURP Process
OpenStack Gazpacho is a Skip Level Upgrade Release Process (SLURP) 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, 2025.1 Epoxy, was issued in April 2025. Operators running that release can upgrade directly to 2026.1 Gazpacho.
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