Partnerships Ensure That OpenStack's Future is Running Containers on Kubernetes

It was only a year ago that I initially covered the news that Google had released Kubernetes under an open-source license. Almost instantly, lots of very big contributors to the Kubernetes project, including IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, Docker, CoreOS, Mesosphere, and SaltStack, all began working in tandem on open source tools and container technologies that can run on multiple computers and networks.

Now, Kubernetes has its most ringing endorsement yet. Mirantis, known for its focus on OpenStack, has announced a collaboration with Google and Intel to evolve the architecture of the leading purpose-built lifecycle management tool for OpenStack, Fuel, and related OpenStack projects, to enable for use of Kubernetes as its underlying orchestration engine. Some are calling this move "the most radical reworking of OpenStack yet, with major implications for Google's planned open standard and open source hybrid cloud."

If you had any doubt before, realize now that OpenStack's future is now permanently married to containers.

Mirantis, Intel and Google will work with the OpenStack community to package OpenStack into Docker containers to be managed by Kubernetes. The companies will jointly discuss the details of this collaboration at the upcoming OpenStack Days Silicon Valley on August 9-10.

According to Mirantis:

"The resulting software will give users fine grain control over the placement of services used for the OpenStack control plane and the ability to do rolling updates of OpenStack, make the OpenStack control plane self-healing and more resilient, and smooth the path for the creating of microservices-based applications on OpenStack."

"To further support Kubernetes on OpenStack, Mirantis will become an active contributor to the Kubernetes project, aiming to become a top contributor over the next year. Mirantis has also joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a Linux Foundation project and organization dedicated to advancing the development of cloud native applications and services, as a Silver member."

 "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. Many enterprises will benefit from using containers and sophisticated cluster management as the foundation for resilient, highly scalable infrastructure," said Google Senior Product Manager, Craig McLuckie.

"Combined open source leadership of Intel and Mirantis will be instrumental in bridging the OpenStack and Kubernetes communities. Our joint efforts will marry two complementary and powerful open source communities, making it simpler for enterprises to manage private clouds," said Intel VP & GM, Software Defined Infrastructure Group, Jonathan Donaldson.

 You can find out more in a blog post from Intel:  Collaborative Efforts Marry OpenStack with Kubernetes.