Mirantis Joins In To Help Integrate Google's Kubernetes With OpenStack

Exhibit one - Mirantis is perhaps the highest profile pure-play OpenStack vendor. Its savvy use of media storms and the huge amount of funding it has got have shone a spotlight on the company and what it does.

Exhibit two - Docker is, of course, one of the highest profile and fastest growing open source initiatives today - since the creation of Docker only a couple of years ago, it has gained almost unbelievable attention and buy-in from vendors and customers alike.

Given these two fact, it only seems natural that these two should get together somehow.

That is happening today with the announcement that Mirantis is developing an integration to combine Kubernetes, the Google initiated Docker orchestration project, with OpenStack. The idea of the integration is to automate the creation and configuration of base infrastructure to make it quicker and easier for developers to deploy Kubernetes clusters on top of OpenStack. The integration itself uses project Murano, an application catalog in OpenStack, to deploy and configure Kubernetes clusters and deploy Docker containers into those clusters. With Murano, developers will be able to move workloads between OpenStack private clouds and public clouds that support Kubernetes, such as Google Cloud Platform. Murano itself  is an OpenStack StackForge project that simplifies application deployment in OpenStack using a point-and-click app store. Murano provides wizards for application configuration simplifying deployments of multi-tier or distributed applications. Murano deploys multi-tier apps configuring infrastructure resources including network, storage, and compute via Heat, the main OpenStack application orchestration engine project.

This is an integration that makes sense - OpenStack is focused on making cloud-scale infrastructure easier to create. Given Docker's growth, it isn't a stretch to predict that significant numbers of future workloads will reside within Docker containers - by ensuring that Docker and OpenStack play together nicely, Mirantis are increasing the chances that organizations will leverage OpenStack for their applications. In turn, and given their size, it gives them a running chance of being the vendor that helps build that OpenStack infrastructure.

Mirantis is also, cunningly, reducing the validity of  VMware's  assertions. At VMware's VMworld conference last year, the company (which, don't forget, still makes a heap of money off of its own compute virtualization software) said that "the best way to manage containers is using VMware software". To this end it announced partnerships with container management company Docker and Google, the latter involving an integration with, you guessed it, Kubernetes. By giving organizations a seamless OpenStack experience, Mirantis, to an extent at least, reduces their reasons to remain in the VMware world.

Of course VMware aren't the only competitive infrastructure player that Mirantis is fighting with. Microsoft also integrated its Azure cloud infrastructure platform into Kubernetes late last year. It seems that everyone wants to play nicely with Docker.

In terms of how this integration, which is due to be demonstrated this week, works, it provides infrastructure for Docker-based applications on OpenStack via the creation of Kubernetes clusters. Murano automatically configures underlying networking for Kubernetes clusters, and provides integration for OpenStack load balancers and firewalls. Murano then deploys the Docker application onto the Kubernetes cluster. To provide Kubernetes clusters, Murano adds integration with monitoring and log collection services. Consequently, developers and operators can use Kubernetes on OpenStack out-of-the-box. They will also be able to move Kubernetes and Docker applications between public and private clouds.