OpenStack pushes its first easy-to-upgrade release out the door

The OpenInfra Foundation has loosed an update of OpenStack on the waiting world and – like everyone else that can spell "virtualization" – has pitched it as fine alternative for those pondering a move away from VMware. OpenStack Caracal is perhaps most notable for being the open source cloud project's first Skip Level Upgrade …

[Crypto Monad]

"improves AI capabilities"?

Can someone tell me exactly what AI capabilities a cloud virtualization environment is supposed to have?

The remainder of the article doesn't talk about AI any further, although it does mention "API-intensive workloads" (which would be something else entirely)

[that one in the corner]

Re: "improves AI capabilities"?

>> gaining the ability to support live migration of virtual GPUs – which those running AI and HPC workloads will appreciate as it means easier access to accelerators attached to different hosts.

Just the assumption that if you are running an "AI" workload you can benefit from shunting it from one host to another without undue effort or having to restart from the beginning. Ditto other long-runtime GPU loads.

Presumably you could also shift your video game to a faster hardware host when that little brat from Oslo logs in (he is going to get his arse kicked *this* time) but that may be overkill (the best kind of kill!).

[rgjnk]

Re: "improves AI capabilities"?

The live migration is just as likely to be about relocating away from hosts that are going down for some reason.

At least that's a use case I've had alongside the load balancing triggers. Done properly it's really handy.

Migrating instances between hosts transparently should be a thing as often as possible as part of the reason for throwing things into a cloud should be that you don't really worry too much about the fine detail of where it's sitting, just that your resource demand is being satisfied. If you're tied too hard into needing to stay on a specific box for the duration you're negating a big reason for it being in a cloud instead of just a box.

Really it has sod all to do with AI beyond a chance to throw in the hot topic. It's really just better GPU support.