Private cloud infrastructure company Mirantis Inc., which offers commercially supported distributions of both OpenStack and Kubernetes for running applications on private clouds, is bundling the two platforms into a single package.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company is also announcing a new deployment and update models that will ensure continuous updates for both platforms. Mirantis’ new distribution is called the Mirantis Cloud Plaftorm, which delivers OpenStack, the private cloud platform, and Kubernetes, the container orchestration software, as a single integrated package along with a new update model, the company said. The new platform is designed as an eventual replacement for the old Mirantis OpenStack distribution, which will no longer be updated.

Explaining the move, Mirantis cofounder and Chief Marketing Officer Boris Renski said the company’s existing update mechanism simply doesn’t cut it in a world where everything is driven by application programming interfaces that are managed and continuously delivered.

“Mirantis OpenStack, which featured Fuel as an installer, was the easiest OpenStack distribution to deploy, but every new version required a forklift upgrade,” Renski said. “Mirantis Cloud Platform departs from the traditional installer-centric architecture and towards an operations-centric architecture, continuously delivered by either Mirantis or the customers’ DevOps team with zero downtime. Updates no longer happen once every six to 12 months, but are introduced in minor increments on a weekly basis.”

MCP 1.0 is essentially just an updated version of Mirantis OpenStack, with Kubernetes becoming a standard add-on to the platform. It also comes with the Mirantis OpenContrail and Calico software-defined networking tools, which are designed for virtual machines running on bare metal and on software application containers, respectively. The Ceph open-source software-defined storage tool, which works with both OpenStack and Kubernetes, is also included in the package.

Asked why Mirantis had decided to fuse OpenStack with Kubernetes, Renski told SiliconANGLE that the company has seen a big demand from customers for a unified cloud that’s able to orchestrate different infrastructure together, as opposed to different isolated stacks on separate hardware, each with its own set of management or orchestration tools.

“Being able to run virtual machines together with Containers on Bare Metal via OpenStack and Kubernetes provides a very broad and robust open cloud platform,” Renski said. “The underpinnings and lifecycle management of MCP is also flexible enough to add other technologies into the cloud platform in the future, should market demand carry us that direction.”

MCP also comes with a new delivery model, wherein the company brings users on board via what it calls a “build-operate-transfer” process. This entails Mirantis creating an open cloud platform for its customers to use for at least 12 months, with the option to move the operational burden to their own data centers. Mirantis said the new delivery model will ensure that the software and the customer’s teams and processes are aligned with best DevOps practices.

As for the new update framework, called Mirantis DriveTrain, this enables what the company calls “DevOps-style lifecycle management” of MCP through continuous integration, testing and delivery.

Mirantis says that all of the components used in MCP are based on open standards. Because customers have the option to transfer the platform to their own data centers, there’s no chance of being locked into the platform, the company said.

Mirantis also said it’s announcing the end of life for Mirantis OpenStack and Fuel. The company will continue supporting both through September 2019, after which companies will need to switch to MCP if they wish to continue receiving commercial support. All existing users will be offered an upgrade path at a later date, Mirantis said.

The Mirantis Cloud Platform is available now.

Image: Mirantis