Pure-play OpenStack vendor Mirantis Inc. shipped out a major update to its distribution this week. Mirantis OpenStack 8 is based on OpenStack Liberty, the most recent stable release of the open-source cloud platform, which debuted last year.

In its press release announcing the new release, Mirantis was keen to emphasize new features designed to enhance stability, in particular a new test suite. As well, Mirantis claimed it’s the “#1 bug fixer in Liberty, with over 1,100 bugs fixed and an additional 300 or so bugs fixed in Mirantis OpenStack 8.0.”

The stability improvements will be no doubt be most welcome, but the biggest new feature comes in the form of Ironic, a bare metal provisioning tool that allows developers to provision bare metal servers at the click of a button, or with an API call. Mirantis said it’s been wanting to integrate Ironic in its distro for some time, but said that it’s only recently that the tool has become “hardened enough to be put into production”.

The big advantage of Ironic is it allows for the automation of real-time and performance-sensitive workloads like Cassandra, Hadoop, MySQL and deep learning, with bare metal servers being provisioned on-demand through Horizon, in the same way as they provision virtual machines.

There’s plenty more in the new release too. Mirantis’ blog post provides a full run down of the new capabilities.

Still, most will appreciate that new features aren’t ever going to be what sets Mirantis’ version of OpenStack apart from the rest. What does distinguish it is that Mirantis OpenStack is by far and away the most popular, most capable “pure-play” version of the open-source cloud. It’s the most solid option for those who want an OpenStack setup that’s not tied to any particular software stack or cloud ecosystem.

“Mirantis doesn’t ship SDN, storage or virtualization platforms with its distribution,” the company notes in a statememt “Instead, at the heart of Mirantis OpenStack is a highly available infrastructure controller that makes it possible to orchestrate a wide range of virtualization, storage, and networking platforms of the customer’s choosing.”

Those who value choice will surely appreciate Mirantis’ pure-play approach, which continues to stand out in a market that’s dominated by vendor offerings which tie OpenStack to other platforms. And it seems as if plenty of people do value that choice, for Mirantis claims more than 26,000 organizations are now currently running its distribution.

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