Manage experimental features

Overview

Canonical OpenStack supports experimental features that are not enabled by default. These features are controlled through feature gates, which allow operators to opt in to functionality that is still under active development or not yet considered production-ready.

Use the commands documented here to discover available feature gates and to enable or disable them.

List feature gates

Feature gates group one or more related features under a common flag. To list all available feature gates:

sunbeam list-feature-gates

Example output:

                              Feature Gates
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Gate Key                  ┃ Type            ┃ Name              ┃ Unlocked ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ feature.baremetal         │ feature         │ baremetal         │          │
│ feature.microovn-sdn      │ feature-gate    │ microovn-sdn      │          │
│ feature.multi-region      │ feature-gate    │ multi-region      │          │
│ feature.shared-filesystem │ feature         │ shared-filesystem │          │
│ feature.storage.dellsc    │ storage-backend │ dellsc            │          │
│ feature.storage.hitachi   │ storage-backend │ hitachi           │          │
└───────────────────────────┴─────────────────┴───────────────────┴──────────┘

The output lists each gate’s key (used with snap set), its type, and name. The Unlocked column is set when the feature gate has been enabled by setting its key to true via sudo snap set openstack.

Enable an experimental feature

To enable an experimental feature, set its corresponding snap configuration option to true:

sudo snap set openstack feature.<feature-name>=true

Replace <feature-name> with the gate key of the feature you want to enable. For example, to enable the multi-region feature gate:

sudo snap set openstack feature.multi-region=true

Note

Experimental features may change or be removed in future releases. Enable them only in environments where instability is acceptable, or when directed to do so by Canonical support.

Disable an experimental feature

To disable a previously enabled experimental feature:

sudo snap set openstack feature.<feature-name>=false