The OpenStack Foundation’s Ironic software is now managing millions of cores of compute all over the world. Thirty organizations are launch members of the program, including vendors running some of the world’s largest OpenStack clouds.

Among these are OpenStack environments of all sizes, including large operators such as Verizon Media and CERN, as well as smaller-scale deployments. Together, these operators manage over a million cores with Ironic. The strong commercial ecosystem supporting Ironic-based solutions also includes large users and commercial providers like Red Hat, Mirantis, China Mobile, and SUSE. These organizations are now identifiable with a new Ironic badge, which also appears in the OpenStack Marketplace.

OpenStack is commonly associated with managing virtual machines, storage and networking. One of the hidden jewels of the open source software, however, is the OpenStack Ironic Bare Metal service. With Ironic, users could manage bare metal infrastructure as they would virtual machine.

Ironic provides a production-proven means to manage the complete lifecycle of bare metal hardware. This software-defined bare metal capability is one reason why adoption of Ironic has grown rapidly with 24% of production deployments now relying on it, up from just 9% in 2016, the Foundation said.