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.
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.
