The OpenStack Foundation today upgraded its cloud infrastructure platform with new capabilities for operators of both private and public clouds.

The OpenStack Rocky release comes with improvements to the “Ironic” bare metal provisioning service and updates that make it easier to migrate to newer versions of the platform. It also adds support for the so-called “serverless” functionality that’s becoming increasingly popular with public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Azure via the new Project Qinling.

OpenStack has already matured to the point where it’s now the most widely deployed open-source infrastructure software, powering thousands of private and public cloud deployments across more than 10 million physical central processing unit cores, the foundation said.

The software is made up of an integration engine and numerous software modules users can mix and match together to create different kinds of functionality. Some examples of those modules include the Ironic bare metal provisioning service, Cinder and Swift, which provide and manage storage resources, and Neutron, which is used to manage networking services.

The Rocky release is a fairly major one, incorporating improvements aimed at making OpenStack more compatible with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, edge computing and software containers.

Ironic, for example, is used to provision bare-metal servers, which are an alternative to virtualization, with virtual machines be installed directly on hardware rather than within the host operating system. The main advantage is that it simplifies the management of the infrastructure.

With the upgrade, Ironic now offers better management and automation capabilities for software containers. It also enables BIOS settings to be managed directly, which is an important capability for running servers without an operating system. Ironic can now also be deployed directly within random-access memory, eliminating the need for persistent storage.

“OpenStack Ironic provides bare metal cloud services, bringing the automation and speed of provisioning normally associated with virtual machines to physical servers,” said Julia Kreger, principal software engineer at Red Hat and OpenStack Ironic project team lead. “This powerful foundation lets you run VMs and containers in one infrastructure platform, and that’s what operators are looking for.”

OpenStack Rocky also enables easier upgrades thanks to the Fast Forward Upgrade Feature, which should encourage more users to update the cloud software sooner.

Elsewhere, the OpenStack Qinling project is included for the first time. Qinling is essentially a Function-as-a-Service, or serverless framework that enables users to focus on things such as application development without needing to manage the underlying infrastructure and resources.

OpenStack Rocky also addresses another recent trend of using hardware accelerators such as graphics processing units and field-programmable gate arrays, which are computer chips that can be reprogrammed on the fly, for AI and machine learning workloads. The new release comes with a lifecycle management service for these kinds of specialized chips.

Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc., said it was encouraging to see OpenStack support the latest hardware innovations with its new release.

“All eyes are on bare metal as this is the most efficient way for CxOs to deploy OpenStack for their next-generation applications,” the analyst said. “Revving Ironic quickly is key for OpenStack to remain competitive on-premises. Adding support for FPGAs via Cyborg is key as well, as is as enabling function-as-a-service via Qinling.”

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