​Mirantis joins Cloud Foundry to ease the PaaS onto OpenStack

Author: Toby Wolpe

In a drive to enable developers to run their choice of tools on top of OpenStack, software and services firm Mirantis is integrating the cloud platform with app-development framework Cloud Foundry.

Mirantis, which has now joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation, says the integration will reduce costs, simplify management and speed up deployments. However, the company has made it clear it will not build a Mirantis Cloud Foundry distribution.

Running Cloud Foundry on OpenStack is already possible but is a relatively complicated undertaking, according to Mirantis.

The open-source Cloud Foundry Foundation, which launched just over a year ago with seven participating organisations, now has 45 members and more than 50 contributing corporations working on the platform-as-a-service initiative. Cloud Foundry was originally developed by VMware and is now owned by EMC-VMware spinoff Pivotal.

OpenStack is an open-source project started in 2010 by Rackspace and NASA to create components for building public and private clouds on standard hardware.

It is now backed by more than 200 vendors, including Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Red Hat, and VMware, with a large developer community working on a range of loosely-coupled projects. Mirantis is one of OpenStack’s founding members.

Mirantis president and CEO Adrian Ionel said his company’s recent work with Google to run Docker cluster-manager Kubernetes on OpenStack was an important step in its strategy of ensuring a wide choice of tools for developers.

“Developers don’t care about how the network is built, how the storage is built – the IT guys care about that. The developers don’t. One side [of OpenStack] is the plumbing level, the infrastructure, what technology I want to use, what servers, what storage, to build a best-of-breed cloud. The other side, which is hugely important, is at the developer tool-chains level,” he said.

“Because ultimately why do we build these clouds? We build them for developers to write apps. They are the end users. They are the consumers of these cloud services. So it’s very important to offer developers a choice of tool chains.”

The motivation behind last month’s Kubernetes integration was the widespread shift among developers to containers for many use cases and the resulting need to manage containers effectively on an OpenStack cloud.

“On exactly the same line many developers want to use Cloud Foundry as a developer toolbox. So this follows in exactly the same footsteps. Now we offer Cloud Foundry integrated with Mirantis OpenStack point and click, which will dramatically lower the cost and time it takes to set and administer a Cloud Foundry environment, making it extremely easy for developers to take advantage of cloud foundry,” Ionel said.

“It follows on the same path, the idea of pure play, best of breed below the stack at the plumbing infrastructure level, and above the stack at the developer tool-chains level. Over time, the developer tool chains will be even more important because at the end of the day this is what developers seek.”

Full article: zdnet.com/article/mirantis-joins-cloud-foundry-to-ease-the-paas-onto-openstack

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