Mirantis Joins Cloud Foundry Foundation, Addressing PaaS and OpenStack

Mirantis is joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation to help allow developers to run best-of-breed tools on top of OpenStack. The company has announced that it will integrate its cloud platform with the app-development framework from Cloud Foundry. We talked about Cloud Foundry's impactful work with open source cloud applications and tools in our recent interview with Cloud Foundry Foundation CEO Sam Ramji.

“Companies everywhere are having to make software and cloud services part of their core competencies,” Ramji said. “Every one of them needs to leverage applications from a limited supply of application developers. So for an open source project to efficiently gather good developers to create code that they can all share —that’s a big core benefit.”  Mirantis will benefit from its new partner in these ways and more.

Becoming part of the Cloud Foundry Foundation will allow Mirantis - which has focused on infrastructure as a service (Iaas) - to work with vendors to supply their distributions.  Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel has said the Cloud Foundry decision is part of the company's effort to support a range of Paas platforms that are competing with each other. This includes Google’s Kubernetes, which we wrote about here, and Mirantis announced last month that it was bringing that container management technology to OpenStack.

“As the pure-play OpenStack company, Mirantis is focused on making OpenStack the best way to build a private cloud and enable software development,” said Alex Freedland, Mirantis co-founder and chairman. “Part of that vision is making it as simple as possible to deploy and manage technologies higher ‘up the stack’ - like Cloud Foundry, which has become a very popular PaaS for developer productivity on top of OpenStack. We believe that OpenStack serves the market best by supporting the most popular PaaS solutions and giving enterprise customers maximum choice, rather than prescribing a specific PaaS.”

Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis, who we interviewed here, has delivered a blog post about Mirantis and Cloud Foundry. He writes:

"Unlike HP or IBM, we are not doing it to build a Mirantis Cloud Foundry distribution. We strongly believe it is the best strategic move for Mirantis to remain the pure play OpenStack company. We keep a singular focus on OpenStack for many reasons, but in this case, it is because we anticipate the PaaS market evolving towards a collision track that may make many promising startups and technologies irrelevant."

“What collisions?” one might ask. “Isn’t it all clear at this point: OpenStack is the open source IaaS; Cloud Foundry is the open source PaaS? The battles have been fought and territories have been captured...no? “

"I argue that we are just scratching the surface of what’s to come. The Docker-fueled container craze is much less of a threat to VMs or OpenStack than it is to PaaS vendors. Container-centric vendors (like Docker) have already learned that monetizing containers to optimize datacenter density won’t win them many customers. There are only so many enterprises that will run homogenous datacenter infrastructure at massive scale; the story of “it works for Google, it’ll work for the enterprise” doesn’t work. Container-centric vendors will soon realize that the way to monetize containers is by selling a container orchestration layer, which is no different than selling PaaS."

With so much going on in the PaaS market, at Mirantis we would rather stick to OpenStack, which is what we do best. This way we can provide our customers with choice at the PaaS layer - whether it’s Cloud Foundry, Docker, OpenShift, Kubernetes or some other PaaS player..."