Wind River Private Cloud Suite 26.03

Wind River® Private Cloud Suite 26.03 — which encompasses Wind River Cloud Platform, OpenStack, Conductor, and Analytics improves performance, security, operations continuity, and system flexibility.

This release has several enhancements. The new features help cloud infrastructure managers, network operations engineers, and site reliability engineers (and the organizations that employ them) achieve resilient operations from edge to core. They can enjoy more confidence and effective results across compute performance, orchestration, identity governance, and lifecycle automation.

ARCHITECTURAL FLEXIBILITY FOR DISTRIBUTED DEPLOYMENTS

The Private Cloud Suite 26.03 release optimizes the platform for faster lifecycle operations, operational agility, and efficient infrastructure utilization across distributed deployments.

A hardware-agnostic approach takes advance of high-performance compute ecosystems to offer architectural choice across distributed and edge environments. That system design enables deployment on diverse processor architectures so organizations can align their infrastructure decisions with performance requirements, cost objectives, and long-term modernization strategies.

In Private Cloud Suite 26.03, hardware support includes:

• Intel® Xeon® 6 performance foundation: Powered by Intel Xeon 6, this strengthens performance at the edge, supporting AI, telco, and enterprise applications in real time.
• AMD EPYC platform expansion: Hardware support is expanded with deployment on AMD EPYC–based servers for mission-critical private cloud environments. This flexible, high-performance compute foundation enables organizations to support real-time RAN workloads and AI-driven applications on shared infrastructure.

Distributed deployments demand system efficiency, especially for routine upgrades and patches. The optimized reboot and service initialization in Private Cloud Suite 26.03 minimizes reboot duration, which reduces maintenance activities’ impact. That lowers downtime exposure, deploys updates faster, and helps technical staff respond faster to infrastructure changes.

Targeted refinements to startup and shutdown sequences make service management better by eliminating unnecessary configuration checks and removing services not required for specific deployments. Efficient shutdown handling reduces reboot time by approximately 20% for single-node cluster (all-in-one simplex), depending on hardware and workload dependencies.

UP-LEVELING SECURITY FEATURES

The security capabilities in Private Cloud Suite empower organizations to protect private cloud environments with greater consistency, operational control, and confidence from edge to core. Release 26.03 additions include:

• Zero-trust protection to centralize identity integration: Private Cloud Suite 26.03 strengthens access governance to align private cloud authentication with enterprise identity and access management (IAM) frameworks and reduce administrative complexity.
• Enterprise OpenID Connect (OIDC) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) integration: Wind River Cloud Platform connects with OIDC-compatible identity providers (IdPs), including solutions that enforce MFA. The result is stronger access controls, consistent policy enforcement, and centralized credential governance, without creating additional identity silos. That’s accomplished by federating authentication for StarlingX APIs, Kubernetes services, and management interfaces using existing corporate identity systems.
• Improved integration for enterprise lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) and Active Directory: Private Cloud Suite 26.03 continues to support both Cloud Platform local LDAP and remote LDAP (Windows Active Directory) back ends. In this release, that integration extends to additional platform interfaces and remote centralized authentication capabilities within OpenStack. Organizations now can authenticate users using an internally managed directory or an existing enterprise Active Directory infrastructure. Consolidating access control across infrastructure and virtualization layers helps the suite reduce fragmented identity stores, simplify user lifecycle management, and enhance auditability and compliance alignment across distributed environments.
• Enforced least-privilege access using granular role-based access control (RBAC): With flexible, policy-driven RBAC, organizations can define custom roles aligned with operational responsibilities. Security policies remain consistent and scalable as deployments expand across sites and regions.

MAKE OPERATIONS EASIER

One goal for Private Cloud 26.03 is to help organizations transform their operations from reactive management to proactive, automated continuity. That’s accomplished by integrating infrastructure orchestration, lifecycle governance, workload protection, and service automation — tasks that are largely managed through Wind River Conductor, part of Private Cloud Suite.

Subcloud rehoming: Conductor now provides subcloud rehoming, which permits technical staff to reorganize infrastructure, migrate edge sites to new system controllers, or prepare disaster recovery environments without interrupting services. Support for both individual and batch processing ensures consistent execution across distributed sites.

Additional autonomous lifecycle governance features: Policy-based closed loop automation reduces manual intervention by enabling policy-driven provisioning, scaling, and deprovisioning of cloud-native workloads. Conductor continuously monitors system state, enforces defined policies, and automatically triggers lifecycle actions. That benefits SLA adherence and prevents configuration drift.

Built-in workload protection and recovery: Centralized scheduling of OpenStack VM, volume, and image backups through Conductor strengthens service resilience across subcloud and stand-alone deployments, with configurable storage targets and batch execution.

COMPUTE AND STORAGE MODERNIZATION

Private Cloud Suite 26.03 expands the enterprise storage area network (SAN) and external storage integration across container and virtual machine workloads. This release extends support for Fibre Channel (FC), Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI), and Network File System (NFS) protocols.

Wind River OpenStack enables external storage backends for Cinder, Glance, and Nova. Combined with CSI-based ecosystem integrations, organizations can deploy internal Ceph, external SAN, or hybrid configurations, offering possibilities for storage path redundancy and failover protection through flexible multipath configuration.

Private Cloud Suite 26.03 advances infrastructure modernization by expanding enterprise SAN and external storage integration across container and virtual machine workloads, strengthening business continuity and delivering enterprise-grade storage capabilities for mission-critical private cloud environments. This modernization is powered by an expanding cloud ecosystem, enabling organizations to integrate with enterprise storage platforms while preserving architectural flexibility.

The approach enables independent scaling of compute and storage, boot-from-SAN and stateless compute models, quality-of-service (QoS) performance isolation, and data protection with synchronous replication and zero–recovery point objective (RPO) disaster recovery. These capabilities strengthen business continuity and reinforce data plane resilience for mission-critical workloads.

TAKE THE NEXT STEP

Wind River Private Cloud Suite 26.03 is the secure, performance-driven, and operationally resilient platform to power private clouds. To learn what’s involved in detail, read the release notes.