OpenStack 2026.1 “Gazpacho” ships April 1, 2026 with meaningful improvements to live migration, networking, storage protection, and the long-running eventlet removal effort. Here is what matters for enterprise customers running managed OpenStack infrastructure.
The OpenStack community releases two coordinated versions per year. The latest – codenamed Gazpacho – lands April 1, 2026. It is a SLURP (Skip Level Upgrade Release Process) release, which means operators can upgrade directly from the previous SLURP (Epoxy, 2025.1) without touching the intermediate release. For managed cloud customers, that translates to fewer upgrade cycles and less disruption.
Open Edge currently runs OpenStack 2025.2 (Flamingo) with eleven integrated services: Keystone, Nova, Neutron (ML2/OVN), Cinder, Glance, Placement, Octavia, Barbican, Heat, Designate, and Ceph RGW for S3-compatible object storage. We are planning the Gazpacho upgrade path now.
Here is what the release contains and why it matters.
What Enterprise Customers Care About
Shorter Maintenance Windows
The headline feature in Nova is parallel live migrations. Previous releases processed live migrations one VM at a time per hypervisor, which meant maintenance windows scaled linearly with the number of workloads on a host. Gazpacho allows multiple VMs to migrate simultaneously, significantly reducing the time required to evacuate a compute node for patching, hardware replacement, or capacity rebalancing.
For customers running dozens of VMs per host, this is the difference between a 45-minute maintenance window and a 15-minute one.
Nova also introduces async volume attach (microversion 2.101), which decouples volume attachment from the synchronous API call path. Large-scale orchestration workflows – deploying 50 instances with attached volumes, for example – no longer block waiting for each attachment to complete sequentially.
Stronger Security Posture
vTPM live migration is now supported, which means VMs using virtual Trusted Platform Modules can be moved between hosts without downtime. Previously, vTPM workloads were pinned to their original host during live migration events, creating an operational headache for security-sensitive deployments that require hardware-backed key storage and measured boot.
On the storage side, Cinder adds Pure Storage SafeMode integration for ransomware protection. SafeMode creates immutable snapshots that cannot be deleted or modified – even by an administrator with full credentials – until a time-based retention window expires. For organizations in regulated industries, this provides a recovery guarantee that software-only backup solutions cannot match.
Heat expands RBAC support for security groups and address scopes, giving operators finer-grained control over who can modify network security policies. This is particularly relevant for multi-tenant environments where different teams need different levels of network access control.
Better Performance
Nova now defaults to one IOThread per VM, which isolates disk I/O processing onto a dedicated thread instead of sharing it with the VM’s main emulation thread. The result is lower disk latency and more predictable storage performance, especially for database workloads and applications with heavy write patterns.
On the networking side, Neutron integrates OVN BGP capabilities directly, enabling dynamic route advertisement without external routing daemons. Combined with OVN BFD (Bidirectional Forwarding Detection) configuration, operators can tune HA failover timing down to sub-second intervals. The practical effect: when a network path fails, traffic reroutes faster.
Neutron also adds a network IP availability details API and router SNAT extensions that improve visibility into address pool utilization and simplify NAT configuration for complex network topologies.
Operational Maturity
The most significant cross-project effort in Gazpacho is the continued migration from eventlet to native Python threading. Eventlet is a cooperative concurrency library that OpenStack adopted early in its history. It works, but it introduces subtle bugs, makes debugging difficult, and conflicts with modern Python libraries that expect native threads. The migration has been underway for several releases, and Gazpacho makes substantial progress – particularly in Nova, where native threading improves both performance and long-term maintainability.
Nova also achieves full OpenAPI schema coverage, meaning every API endpoint now has a machine-readable specification. This matters for automation: infrastructure-as-code tools, custom integrations, and API clients can validate requests before sending them, reducing the “deploy and hope” debugging cycle.
Cinder introduces multi-region backup support, allowing volume backups to be stored in geographically separate storage backends. For disaster recovery planning, this is a meaningful addition.
What Operators Need to Know
Breaking Changes
WSGI script removal. Several services have removed their legacy WSGI entry-point scripts. Operators using Apache or nginx as a reverse proxy with these scripts need to update their service configurations to use the newer uwsgi or direct-serve patterns. For Kolla-Ansible deployments like ours, this is handled in the deployment tooling.
Windows support removed from Cinder. The Cinder project has completely dropped Windows host support. This does not affect Windows guest VMs – those continue to work normally. It means Cinder storage services can no longer run on Windows hosts, which was already uncommon in production deployments.
SLURP Upgrade Path
Gazpacho is a SLURP release, meaning it is part of the long-term support upgrade chain. Organizations on the previous SLURP release (Epoxy, 2025.1) can upgrade directly to Gazpacho without passing through Flamingo (2025.2). Organizations already on Flamingo – like Open Edge – upgrade one step forward as usual.
The SLURP model reduces the number of mandatory upgrades from two per year to one for organizations that prefer a slower cadence, while still receiving security patches and critical fixes on the SLURP branch.
What This Means for Open Edge Customers
Open Edge is a managed cloud provider. Our customers do not run OpenStack upgrades. We do.
We are currently running Flamingo (2025.2) across our production infrastructure at Iron Mountain VA-1. Our engineering team is evaluating Gazpacho now, and the upgrade is planned for our standard release cycle. When it happens, customers will see the benefits – faster maintenance windows, better storage performance, improved networking HA – without touching a single configuration file.
That is the point of managed infrastructure. The platform gets better. Your team stays focused on your applications.
All workloads continue to run on FIPS 140-3 validated encryption (CMVP Certificate #5115), within infrastructure that follows SOC 2/ISO 27001 control frameworks, operated exclusively by US-based personnel in US-based facilities.
Get Started
If your organization is evaluating private cloud infrastructure – or reconsidering whether your current provider is keeping pace with the upstream – we would like to have that conversation.