I'm happy to announce that OpenStack Swift 2.8.0 has been released. This release includes several feature improvements and important bug fixes, and I recommend that everyone upgrade as soon as possible. As always, you can upgrade to this version with no end-user downtime. The full release notes can be found at https://github.com/openstack/swift/blob/master/CHANGELOG. The release is available at https://tarballs.openstack.org/swift/. Feature highlights: * Concurrent bulk deletes now uses concurrency to speed up the process. This will result in faster API responses to end users. The amount of concurrency used is configurable by the operator, and it defaults to 2. * Server-side copy has been refactored to be entirely encapsulated in middleware. Not only does this make the code cleaner and make it easier to support external middleware, this change is necessary for the upcoming server-side encryption functionality. * The `fallocate_reserve` setting can now be a percent of drive capacity instead of just a fixed number of bytes. * the deprecated `threads_per_disk` setting has been removed. Deployers are encouraged to use `servers_per_port` instead. Bug-fix highlights: * Fixed an infinite recursion issue when syslog is down. * Fixed a rare case where a backend failure during a read could result in a missing byte in the response body. * `disable_fallocate` not also correctly disables `fallocate_reserve`. * Fixed an issue where a single-replica configuration for account or container DBs could result in the DB being inadvertently deleted if it was placed on a handoff node. * Reclaim isolated .meta files if they are older than the `reclaim_age`. This release is the work of 42 different developers, including 16 first-time contributors. That you to the whole community for your work during this release. --John