Securing partnerships with larger and better-established players is a key priority in the growth plans of any software startup, which is why landing the backing of a top OpenStack distributor is such a big deal for CoreOS Inc.’s container push. The newly announced alliance with Mirantis Inc. focuses first and foremost on its commercial management platform.

Tectonic, as the offering is called, made its debut four months ago with the promise of simplifying the notoriously difficult chore of orchestrating container clusters for traditional organizations that don’t have the will or resources build out all the necessary scaffolding on their own. The software bundles the free Kubernetes management framework from Google Inc. with support services and, most importantly, a homegrown administrative console.

The dashboard hides the complexity of the cluster behind an interface that CoreOS says allows for rapid deployment and updating of applications along with monitoring of the underlying components. At the bottom of the stack is the startup’s namesake version of Linux, which provides a lightweight platform for running containers, preferably its own flavor but optionally also the more popular alternative from rival Docker Inc., which Mirantis supports as well.

The partnership with CoreOS has already seen the company integrate Tectonic with its OpenStack distribution in an effort to provide customers with more options in how to run their implementations. The project was originally created with traditional virtual machines in mind, but its flexibility and interoperable nature lend themselves even better to containers, which are inherently well-equipped for moving among different environments.

Providing support for Tectonic in its distribution enables Mirantis to offer customers a unified management framework across all of their OpenStack deployments, making it a lot more viable to implement a hybrid cloud model using containers and its pitch that much stronger with the same stroke. But of greater interest to CoreOS is the fact that now that the top distributor has thrown its weight behind its framework, the competition is bound to follow suit, which means more partnerships.

Photo via CoreOS