Mirantis Grabs Kubernetes Maestro To Orchestrate OpenStack Inversion

Mirantis has bought a Kubernetes master to fulfil its common goal with Intel and Google: to wrap up OpenStack for micro services.

The OpenStack flinger has bought TCP Cloud, a 30-person specialist in running managed services on OpenStack, OpenContrail and Kubernetes.

The purchase buys TCP Cloud’s open-source MK.20 technology. Financial terms for the Czech Republic-based firm were not disclosed.

MK.20 uses a design pattern employed by AWS, Google Compute Cloud and Microsoft Azure to maintain their clouds. It tackles the problem of deploying and managing upgrades when using OpenStack as a micro service via Google’s Kubernetes.

Mirantis in August announced a partnership with Google and Intel to run OpenStack as containers, orchestrated using the Kubernetes orchestration tool.

It was an inversion of a dominant idea of having containers work well on OpenStack.

TCP Cloud’s software lets you manage integration points, the lifecycle of services, and managing infrastructure as code. It deals with version control, with all code managed centrally, via GitHub, acting as a single source of truth.

Alex Freedland, Mirantis chief executive, reckoned the big advantage of MK.20 is it saves OpenStack users the job of building such tooling themselves.

“The guys in TCP Cloud were thinking of industrial scale from day one,” he told The Reg. “Today nothing like this has been productized.”

Through its acquisition, MK.20 will be integrated with Mirantis’ Fuel software to deploy and manage OpenStack clouds and resources.

Founded in 2011, Mirantis is emerging as a strong independent name in OpenStack. The firm has not just survived a period of consolidation, but has attracted venture support – $200m in four rounds. Freedland claimed Mirantis now employs 900 people and has a business run rate of nearly $100m. ®

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