Cloud Foundry Gets a New Backer in Mirantis

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The open source Cloud Foundry Foundation is growing today with the addition of OpenStack vendor Mirantis to its membership roster. The move is a very interesting one for many reasons.

Cloud Foundry has emerged in recent years to become a leading Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) platform. The project which was originally started as an open source effort by VMware back in 2011 and then spun out to VMware’s sister company Pivotal. The Cloud Foundry Foundation itself was officially announced in December 2014, as a Linux Foundation backed collaboration project.

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EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Pivotal, SAP and VMware are all platinum members of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. In the case of HP, IBM and Pivotal, they all have their own respective Cloud Foundry distributions as well. The addition of Mirantis will see yet another Cloud Foundry distribution added to the mix.

“We strongly believe it is the best strategic move for Mirantis to remain the pure play OpenStack company, and to actively integrate best-in-class outside technologies into OpenStack,” Mirantis co-founder Boris Renski wrote in a blog post. “We do this because it is the best way to give our customers choice in how they architect their cloud, and it applies to the PaaS layer.”

Mirantis has emerged to become one of the leading vendors in the OpenStack space, both in terms of code and money. In October 2014, Mirantis raised $100 million in funding as it gears up toward a 2016 IPO.

Being focused on OpenStack, Mirantis’s goal is to make sure it can integrate technologies with OpenStack. It’s a goal that makes a whole lot of sense. While some of my peers in the media (and some vendors, too) are focused on the drama of who works with who, and which vendors don’t like each other, the simple truth is that at the end of the day, only one thing matters: the customer deployment, and making sure it works, regardless of the vendors involved.

That’s why Mirantis has been a successful business so far. From the very first time I met with Mirantis, the company was all about services, training and helping organizations to actually deploy OpenStack. In the early days of OpenStack, in fact, there was hardly an OpenStack deployment that I was aware off that didn’t have Mirantis’s fingerprints all over it.

Mirantis isn’t betting on a winner in the PaaS race, either. Mirantis also has a strategic relationship to bring the Google Kubernetes project into the OpenStack realm as well. Kubernetes, not coincidentally, is the key container orchestration piece that enables Red Hat’s upcoming OpenShift 3.0 PaaS release. OpenShift is largely regarded as the primary competitor to Cloud Foundry.

I’ve long thought of OpenStack as the ‘Big Tent’ model under which all manner of technologies are welcome. OpenStack itself is at its most basic level a framework and a set of APIs that enable technologies to be plugged in, including compute, storage and networking.

Considering that HP, IBM, VMware and EMC are all members of the OpenStack Foundation already as well, it now seems that with the addition of Mirantis to Cloud Foundry, that OpenStack’s interests will be well represented in the PaaS market.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist

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