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Demystifying NetApp Adaptive QoS in OpenStack Genestack

Configuring multi-tenant Quality of Service (QoS) for enterprise storage in OpenStack sounds straightforward on paper: define standard and high-performance tiers, specify IOPS per gigabyte, and let the storage backend handle enforcement. In practice, our journey implementing NetApp ONTAP Adaptive QoS (AQoS) across Rackspace OpenStack Flex and Genestack production environments revealed sharp discrepancies between early published deployment specifications and storage reality.

When Hardware Offload Goes Silent: The Case of the Orphaned TC Flowers

In large-scale cloud infrastructure, few things sound as compelling on paper as hardware offloading. When you are running Genestack—powering enterprise OpenStack clouds orchestrated on top of Kubernetes with Kube-OVN and Open vSwitch (OVS)—encapsulating Geneve overlay traffic and tracking connection state can consume measurable CPU cycles across a busy fleet. Offloading those flow tables and match-action rules directly into the physical NIC silicon is the holy grail: line-rate throughput, near-zero CPU overhead, and microsecond packet handling.

Until your network cards decide they cannot actually handle it.

Putting Swift's S3 API to Work for AI Workloads on OpenStack Flex

I'll be honest. When someone says "object storage for AI" the picture in most people's heads is a purpose-built S3 appliance with a six-figure invoice attached, or a hyperscaler bucket with an egress meter running. Swift, the OpenStack object store that has been quietly holding petabytes since 2010, rarely makes the list. It's old. It doesn't have a launch video. It speaks S3 through a middleware rather than natively.

Our team has been leaning on that middleware harder every month. Model weights, training shards, and lately the KV cache that vLLM spills out of GPU memory all land in Swift buckets through the S3 API, and at some point "it seems fine" stops being an acceptable answer to "how fast is it." So we did what you're supposed to do. We picked an open source benchmark, built a container around it, ran the object sizes that AI workloads actually produce, and kept the numbers.

Rescuing a Linux based Boot-From-Volume Instance in OpenStack

When an OpenStack instance backed by a persistent Cinder volume (Boot-From-Volume, or BFV) gets corrupted, misconfigured, or suffers a broken bootloader, recovery can be challenging. However, OpenStack control planes (introduced in Ussuri) support Stable Device Instance Rescue for volume-backed instances.

This guide provides a comprehensive guide to help analyze the storage layout and some basic commands to reapir a filesystem using nativ Linux tools.

Bringing the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 Online in OpenStack Flex

I'll be honest. When the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 first showed up on my radar, I wasn't sure what to make of it. It's not a traditional datacenter card and it's not a gaming card either. The R9700 is a 32 GB professional GPU that won't break the bank, and sits in a product category that didn't really exist eighteen months ago.

This week our team brought a pair of R9700 GPUs online in Rackspace OpenStack Flex; like any good story there was a bit of drama with servers, placement, shipping times, cables oddities, chassis crisis, and more; we had the making of a full feature length K-Drama with all the twists and turns. Once we got past the drama, parts were installed and powered on, the entire deployment took about ten minutes which is a testament to the power of Genestack's Kubernetes-native architecture and OpenStack's hardware-agnostic design.