The upstart OpenStack vendor Mirantis Inc. has said it’s teaming up with Google and Intel to advance the development of Fuel, a lifecycle management tool, so that OpenStack can be deployed in containers.

The idea is to allow Fuel to use Kubernetes as its underlying orchestration engine. Once that’s ready, the partners say they’ll work with the OpenStack community to package the software in Docker containers managed by Kubernetes.

OpenStack has already added support for containers in the last couple of releases, but running OpenStack on top of containers is a much more complicated task. CoreOS Inc. has already moved in that direction with its Stackanetes project, though that initiative has taken place outside of the main OpenStack community. However, Mirantis, Google and Intel plan to change this by working alongside the community and existing orchestration tools to make it easier to manage OpenStack container deployments at scale.

The partnership will see Mirantis create a new continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline under the OpenStack Fuel project, allowing for containerized OpenStack deployment and operations capabilities to be developed. Once it’s stable, the new software is envisaged to give users fine-grain control over the OpenStack control plane’s services, and will also enable rolling updates. In addition, the OpenStack control plane will be more resilient and self-healing, smoothing the path for the creation of microservices apps on OpenStack.

“With the emergence of Docker as the standard container image format and Kubernetes as the standard for container orchestration, we are finally seeing continuity in how people approach operations of distributed applications,” Mirantis CMO Boris Renski said in a statement. “Combining Kubernetes and Fuel will open OpenStack up to a new delivery model that allows faster consumption of updates, helping customers get to outcomes faster.”

Craig McLuckie, a Senior Product Manager at Google, also commented. “Leveraging Kubernetes in Fuel will turn OpenStack into a true microservice application, bridging the gap between legacy infrastructure software and the next generation of application development,” he said. “Many enterprises will benefit from using containers and sophisticated cluster management as the foundation for resilient, highly scalable infrastructure.”

The announcement marks an admission of what many have suspected all along, that OpenStack is no longer the solution for everything, but rather, just a part of that solution. As such, it’s little wonder that Mirantis is looking to move away from being just a pure-play OpenStack vendor.

That much was made clear by Mirantis’ second announcement – that it’s to become an active contributor to the open-source Kubernetes project, with the ambition of becoming one of its top contributors in the next 12 months. In addition, Mirantis is also joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a Silver member. That initiative, sponsored by the Linux Foundation, is dedicated to advancing the development of cloud-native applications and services.

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