At the OpenStack Summit in Sydney, Australia, Red Hat announced the latest version of their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform: Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 is based on OpenStack “Pike,” the latest release of the open source IaaS platform. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 delivers many new enhancements, including upgraded distributed continuous integration (DCI) and improved security to help maintain data compliance and manage risk.

However, the most significant feature of this release is that Red Hat has started to containerize OpenStack services to help deliver new offerings to the market faster, because today’s organizations need a cloud infrastructure that can allocate resources quickly, efficiently, and at scale.

“Running OpenStack services on Linux containers does just that; it can increase flexibility for upgrades, rollback and service management while reducing cloud management complexity for operators. Additionally, Linux containers make it easier to scale OpenStack services quickly, helping customers meet greater user demand when it counts the most.” said the company in a press release.

Since Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 containerizes the majority of OpenStack services, it has become easy to deploy a new implementation or perform an automated upgrade through its Director tool. Red Hat is also offering a containerized Technology Preview of certain networking and storage services with this release.

This development is a major shift in the direction of containers becoming the building blocks of enterprise software.