Looking to boost confidence in the production readiness of the OpenStack cloud-management framework, Mirantis today released an update to its OpenStack distribution.

Kamesh Pemmaraju, vice president of product marketing, says Mirantis has carefully vetted all the components that make up version 8.0 of Mirantis OpenStack. To that end, Mirantis claims to have fixed some 300 bugs in the Liberty release of OpenStack.

“Unlike many other providers of OpenStack, we simply don’t just pass along the raw distribution,” says Pemmaraju. “IT organizations need to distinguish between what’s an open source project versus an actual product.”

In fact, Pemmaraju says that Mirantis OpenStack 8.0 is certified to run across 200 nodes out of the box. To help give IT organizations additional confidence in OpenStack, Mirantis in this release is also including a new performance test suite to measure individual networking, storage I/O, and Ceph components that make up OpenStack. Mirantis OpenStack 8.0 also sports a new component registry that gives more contextual help and visual cues about which OpenStack components are actually interoperable.

In addition, Mirantis is now adding support for both Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well as an Ironic module that gives IT organizations the option of running on top of a bare metal server, versus always requiring the presence of a virtual machine.

In general, Pemmaraju says, IT organizations should not view OpenStack as a replacement for other forms of virtualization. OpenStack is specifically optimized for distributed, cloud-native applications. As such, Pemmaraju says, it does not lend itself as well to running, for example, monolithic applications such as SAP.

“Comparing OpenStack to VMware is one of those apples-to-oranges comparison that too many people make,” says Pemmaraju.

Long-term, most IT organizations are going to wind up running OpenStack alongside their current virtualization frameworks for years to come. The next big challenge, of course, will be figuring out what framework to deploy and when, as application workloads continue to evolve in a world where microservices based on containers could soon become the IT norm.