Happy Monday and welcome to this pulse’s Sunbeam Forecast! Over the last pulse, we’ve been hard at work on upgrade safety, validation, OpenStack 2026.1 Gazpacho readiness, and some dabbling in AI-powered features. Here’s what landed recently and here’s what’s coming next:
Highlights from the Last Pulse
mysql-k8s charm upgrade improvement - Continued work on improving the MySQL charm upgrade workflow in Sunbeam, strengthening reliability during rolling upgrades and reducing operational risk.
Rate limiting for HAProxy-backed OpenStack charms - Ongoing work introduces rate limiting capabilities for OpenStack charms that rely on HAProxy. This provides better protection against burst traffic and misbehaving clients, improving stability and resilience of API services under load.
Chaos Mesh validation converted to BDD tests - Sunbeam’s chaos-mesh validation suite is being converted to Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) tests and integration with the Canonical Test Observer Suite. This improves readability, reproducibility, and long-term maintainability of failure-injection testing.
Juju scale-down BDD tests added - New BDD tests now validate Juju scale-down operations for Sunbeam applications within the Test Observer Suite. This increases confidence in real-world scaling workflows and ensures regressions are caught earlier.
Sunbeam Cinder Factory (AI-powered backend driver generation) - Initial implementation of a Cinder “factory” concept that leverages AI to generate Cinder storage backend driver scaffolding for Sunbeam environments. This lowers the barrier for integrating new storage backends and accelerates experimentation with custom drivers.
New sunbeam list-features command - A new CLI command allows operators to see which features are available and which are currently enabled in their deployment. This improves observability and makes feature discovery much more transparent for users operating multi-feature environments.
Region-aware openrc generation - Sunbeam’s openrc generation has been extended to support region awareness. This improves usability for multi-region deployments and ensures environment configuration reflects the correct regional context.
OpenStack 2026.1 Gazpacho updates - Ongoing updates to rocks, charms, and snaps to support the latest and greatest from upstream OpenStack in Sunbeam.
Goals for the Next Pulse
- Continued Gazpacho readiness work - Rock, snap, and charm upgrades to hit the ground running when OpenStack 2026.1 releases.
- Hardening upgrade and scale workflows - Continued validation and testing improvements to ensure safe upgrades and predictable scaling in production environments.
- Expanding automated validation coverage - Building on the new BDD-based tests to improve confidence in real-world deployment scenarios.
How to Get Involved
No contribution is too big or too small. Regardless of skill level, come chat!
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Matrix: OpenStack Sunbeam
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Discussion and Background: Upstream OpenStack Community -
Documentation: Sunbeam Documentation
Code: 
Bugs: Thanks again to everyone contributing code, docs, reviews, and feedback. Your enthusiasm keeps Sunbeam moving forward!
See you in the next Forecast! 