The OpenStack community released the sixteenth version of its open source software, called Pike. Release highlights include allowing users to pick the functionality they need for their infrastructure — bare metal or block storage provisioning.

For example, OpenStack’s bare metal service now includes enhanced integration for block storage and networking. This means that block storage can be used as a standalone storage service for virtual machines (VMs), bare metal, or containers using Docker or Kubernetes.

This composability makes use cases like edge computing and network functions virtualization (NFV) possible, which wasn’t available in earlier OpenStack versions.

The new release also includes new capabilities designed to improve management and increase scalability. Pike allows operators to share their deployments to help with scaling databases as well as segregate failure domains to eliminate single points of failure. For example, even if a cross-region network is down, individual regions can still function, and failures in one region can use the remote region to recover.

OpenStack’s block storage capability also now lets users recover from data corruption by resetting the data back to its original version. Users can also now extend storage volumes without shutting down VMs, keeping applications live during extensions.

OpenStack currently powers 60 public cloud availability zones and more than 1,000 private clouds.