Mirantis And CoreOS Launch Enterprise-Grade OpenStack And Kubernetes Integration

OpenStack company Mirantis and CoreOS today announced that they have teamed up to integrate Mirantis’ OpenStack distribution with CoreOS’s Tectonic container platform. Together, the two companies will now offer enterprises the ability to use both OpenStack and Kubernetes, the Google-incubated container management and scheduling tool, on a platform that offers “enterprise-grade support and manageability.”

To some degree, the jury is still out on how well OpenStack, which essentially gives enterprises a self-hosted AWS-like cloud platform, and containers can play with each other. The OpenStack foundation, at least, believes the two are a natural fit. In this view, OpenStack functions as an integration engine that can help enterprises manage both regular virtual machines and containers with the help of services like Kubernetes.

“OpenStack is quickly becoming the preferred open source cloud platform for a range of technologies — VMs, containers, bare metal and whatever comes next,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, in today’s announcement. “Project contributors like CoreOS, Mirantis and Google are helping the community offer enterprises a cohesive open source cloud solution powered by OpenStack.”

CoreOS’s Tectonic, which can run both on premise and on public clouds, launched in preview in late July. The service offers a commercially supported Container infrastructure platform that combines Kubernetes, CoreOS and Docker containers.

“Now that Kubernetes is production-ready, companies using Tectonic and Mirantis OpenStack can have a Google-like infrastructure at their fingertips,” said Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS. “Mirantis possesses a deep understanding of open source software and their commitment to the open source ecosystem around OpenStack is second to none. It was natural to work with Mirantis to help customers see the benefits of Kubernetes on OpenStack.”

It’s taken a few years for the OpenStack project to make inroads into the enterprise, but as Red Hat’s Tim Yeaton, who oversees the company’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service business (including OpenStack), told me earlier this week, he’s seeing an increase in companies that are now moving from pilots to production.

This shift is happening at the same time as enterprises are also starting to get interested in the idea of containers, so it only makes sense for companies to try to combine these two. The idea behind OpenStack, after all, has always been to be an integration engine that is mostly agnostic. There is no need for OpenStack companies like Mirantis to reinvent the wheel, so integrating with container-centric products like CoreOS’s Tectonic is probably the easiest way for them to provide their customers with the best of both worlds.