Private-cloud software company Mirantis Inc. wants to help enterprises shift their most critical software applications to the public cloud with a new tool based on the open-source continuous delivery platform Spinnaker.

The Mirantis Application Platform is a new product that’s distinct from the Mirantis Cloud Platform, which is an infrastructure offering based on OpenStack and Kubernetes that’s used for building private clouds. With the Mirantis Application Platform, the company is enabling enterprises to run their applications on public clouds such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform and keep them up to date using a cloud-native continuous delivery approach.

Continuous delivery is a method of software development that allows for application updates to be rolled out faster and with fewer bugs. The idea is that production and test environments for software are kept as similar as possible, with the testing and deployment performed by automated systems. This allows for software to be built, tested and finally released to end users in a much faster time-frame than is possible with older development methods.

Spinnaker is a multicloud continuous delivery platform that was first designed by Netflix Inc. and later improved upon by Google LLC and others after being open-sourced. It now serves as the foundation for the Mirantis Application Platform, which is aimed squarely at larger enterprises.

“Continuous delivery platforms like Spinnaker offer limited value unless properly tuned to customer use cases and integrated with the rest of their enterprise tools,” said Mirantis Chief Executive Officer Adrian Ionel.

The Mirantis Application Platform allows companies to move their applications to public clouds by recreating the same execution environments that were used on-premises. The main benefit is that companies can then adopt the continuous integration model for their apps, allowing them to increase the frequency of production deployments by a factor of 10, the company said. The platform also helps customers to avoid cloud lock-in, thanks to its native integration with the Kubernetes software container orchestration platform.

“Getting ROI from cloud for a large enterprise requires streamlining the various processes, tools and security requirements across a diverse set of engineering silos,” Ionel said. “Mirantis Application Platform aims to address this challenge.”

The Mirantis Application Platform is currently available in beta ahead of a full release expected later this year.

Image: Mirantis