The OpenStack Foundation, which houses the open-source cloud infrastructure project of the same name, today announced its 17th release.

OpenStack Queens delivers a bunch of important new updates and features around software-defined storage, graphics processing unit compatibility and container workloads, the foundation said. The updates illustrate how OpenStack is evolving fast to meet the changing needs of its users, officials said.

“In the early days of cloud, the use cases were fairly narrow, but the scope of cloud use cases today has expanded to include a massive variety of workloads,” said OpenStack Foundation Chief Operating Officer Mark Collier. “Just as the scope of cloud evolves, OpenStack evolves as a platform.”

One of the most interesting aspects of OpenStack’s ongoing evolution is its support for vGPUs, which refers to the ability to attach graphics processing unit chips to virtual machines. Before the update, most users that wanted to attach GPUs to their VMs would do so on bare-metal servers, those with no other software installed on them.

However, that method was somewhat inefficient because bare-metal servers can be awkward to configure. With the update, it’s now possible to boot up a virtual machine with a vGPU and begin running machine learning and scientific workloads on them immediately, the foundation said.

OpenStack has also introduced support for additional acceleration resources such as field-programmable gate arrays, which are integrated circuits that can be programmed for different use cases to boost performance. FPGA support comes via the Cyborg project, which makes these resources available as standalone machines or as part of the OpenStack virtual machine platform.

OpenStack has also been working hard to integrate software container technology, which allows developers to build applications without worrying about the underlying hardware and operating system. The release features a new Zun container service that allows users to get containers up and running without needing to manage servers and clusters. Zun relies on Openstack’s core services to take care of matters such as networking, storage and authentication, meaning developers can just focus on building and maintaining their apps.

Also on the container front, OpenStack has added improved support for the Kubernetes orchestration software in the new release. Kuryr adds native concepts from Kubernetes such as pods, which enable a group of clusters to be deployed on the same host.

OpenStack is also using container technology to make it easier to deploy its platform at the network edge, officials said. For example, a project called OpenStack Helm provides easy lifecycle management for running OpenStack on Kubernetes.

Helm also allows individual OpenStack projects to be run as independent services. Meanwhile, another new project called the Lightweight Open Container Initiative provides container images for these services, helping make it easier to run OpenStack at the edge of networks.

The addition of support for GPUs and edge computing is especially significant because those are key requirements for next-generation applications, said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc.

“It’s important for corporate officials to see that OpenStack keeps investing and growing its capabilities, and that modern applications can be run in OpenStack-managed data centers,” Mueller said. “The Queens release is an important data point that instills confidence in the future of OpenStack.”

Also helping to boost confidence in the platform are new features designed to ensure higher availability, which was a key request from some of the project’s major users, most of which are in the telecommunications business.

“It’s easy to gloss over terms like maturity and manageability when they are used to describe software, but the OpenStack community believes those objectives to be at the core of our mission,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. “Eight years in, features that enhance manageability, resiliency, scalability and user experience are still paramount and still have sizzle factor.”

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