Hibiscus-1 milestone¶

May 14, 2026 is the Hibiscus-1 milestone. See project-specific notes for relevant deadlines.

2026.1 Gazpacho Cycle-Trailing Release Deadline¶

All projects following the cycle-trailing release model must release their 2026.1 Gazpacho deliverables by June 4, 2026.

Hibiscus-2 milestone¶

July 2, 2026 is the Hibiscus-2 milestone. See project-specific notes for relevant deadlines.

Membership Freeze¶

Projects must participate in at least two milestones in order to be considered part of the release. Projects made official after the second milestone, or which fail to produce milestone releases for at least one of the first and second milestones as well as the third milestone, are therefore not considered part of the release for the cycle. This does not apply to cycle-trailing packaging / lifecycle management projects.

Extra-AC freeze¶

All contributions to OpenStack are valuable, but some are not expressed as Gerrit code changes. That allow teams to list active contributors to their projects and who do not have a code contribution this cycle, and therefore won’t automatically be considered an Active Contributor and allowed to vote. This is done by adding extra-acs to https://opendev.org/openstack/governance/src/branch/master/reference/projects.yaml before the Extra-AC freeze date.

Final release for non-client libraries¶

Libraries that are not client libraries (Oslo and others) should issue their final release during this week. That allows to give time for last-minute changes before feature freeze.

Hibiscus-3 milestone¶

August 27, 2026 is the Hibiscus-3 milestone. See project-specific notes for relevant deadlines.

Feature freeze¶

The Hibiscus-3 milestone marks feature freeze for projects following the release:cycle-with-rc model. No featureful patch should be landed after this point. Exceptions may be granted by the project PTL.

Final release for client libraries¶

Client libraries should issue their final release during this week, to match feature freeze.

Soft StringFreeze¶

You are no longer allowed to accept proposed changes containing modifications in user-facing strings. Such changes should be rejected by the review team and postponed until the next series development opens (which should happen when RC1 is published).

Requirements freeze¶

After the Hibiscus-3 milestone, only critical requirements and constraints changes will be allowed. Freezing our requirements list gives packagers downstream an opportunity to catch up and prepare packages for everything necessary for distributions of the upcoming release. The requirements remain frozen until the stable branches are created, with the release candidates.

RC1 target week¶

The week of September 7, 2026 is the target date for projects following the release:cycle-with-rc model to issue their first release candidate.

Hard StringFreeze¶

This happens when the RC1 for the project is tagged. At this point, ideally no strings are changed (or added, or removed), to give translators time to finish up their efforts.

Final RCs and intermediary releases¶

The week of September 21, 2026 is the last week to issue release candidates or intermediary releases before release week. During release week, only final-release-critical releases will be accepted (at the discretion of the release team).

2026.2 Hibiscus release¶

The 2026.2 Hibiscus coordinated release will happen on Wednesday, September 30, 2026.

Cycle Highlights¶

Cycle highlights need to be added to the release deliverables after the feature freeze to be included in any marketing release messaging. Highlights may be added after this point, but they will likely only be useful for historical purposes.

See the Project Team Guide for more details and instructions on adding these highlights.

For examples of previous release highlights: 2025.1 Epoxy Highlights. 2025.2 Flamingo Highlights.