Mirantis OpenStack 9.0 improves post-deployment support, private cloud operations

Mirantis, the pure play open source company, has announced the release of Mirantis OpenStack 9.0, which is based on OpenStack Mitaka.

“The improvements in Mirantis OpenStack 9.0 are based on real-world production deployments of Mirantis OpenStack, including our collaborations with AT&T and Volkswagen,” said Boris Renski, co-founder and CMO of Mirantis. “The improvements we made — largely in the area of post-deployment operations — integrate Mirantis’ services expertise into the software so that we can deliver better business outcomes. Mirantis OpenStack 9.0 will be a valuable asset to Mirantis as we help customers build and operate private clouds.”

When I inquired about how the AT&T and Volkswagen deployment helped Mirantis and what improvements were made, Amara Kapadia, senior director, product marketing at Mirantis told me in an interview, “We implemented feedback from AT&T into improvements around lifecycle management; SDN & NFV features; multi-region support & high availability; and the overall stability of the release. Feedback from Volkswagen led to us making it easier to onboard workloads (such as CI/CD pipeline, Kubernetes and multi-cloud support); security; and again, overall stability and manageability.”

Talking about the major improvements over the previous release of Mirantis OpenStack, and why customers should upgrade to 9.0, Kapadia said, “By upgrading to 9.0, customers will gain significant new functionality for Day-2 post-deployment management, new NFV features, improved stability and the Mitaka feature set.”

Kapadia wrote in a blog post that they have added new functionalities in Mirantis OpenStack to simplify both initial deployment and post-deployment operations. Because no cloud is static and it changes after deployment they focused on the shaded box, i.e., post-deployment changes.

Customers can use Fuel, the OpenStack management project, to add certain plugins post deployment without having to redeploy the entire cloud. “It also keeps certain settings ‘unlocked’ after initial deployment. If a setting remains unlocked, it can similarly be changed without having to redeploy the cloud,” wrote Kapadia.

This release also brings support for a wide range of network function virtualization (NFV) infrastructure acceleration features including huge pages, SR-IOV, NUMA/CPU pinning and a technical preview of DPDK.

OpenStack Mitaka is the 13th OpenStack release, and was built by a community of 2,336 developers and operators and users from 345 organizations. Mirantis dedicated 327 Mitaka committers, 87 core contributors, provided 1.37 million lines of code and conducted 52,000 reviews. Mirantis is not just one of the leading contributors to OpenStack, it is the top contributor to this release.