CoreOS aims to make OpenStack deployment easier with Stackanetes

Stackanetes is a CoreOS initiative to deploy and manage OpenStack as an application on Kubernetes, the open source container cluster manager from Google. It is a “fully containerized OpenStack running on top of Kubernetes,” said Alex Polvi, co-founder and CEO of CoreOS.

Speaking at the OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas today, Polvi asked the audience to ‘free their mind.’ and not think of OpenStack as some complex piece of software that needs a complex way to manage it. Polvi said that OpenStack is just an application, it’s a bunch of things but still it’s an application OS. So it’s subject to installation, upgrading, life cycle management just like any other application.

During a live demo of Stackanetes with Tectonic, a commercial distribution of the combined Kubernetes and CoreOS stack, Polvi launched a new server. Then he showed self healing of the servers where he killed a pod and then it healed itself; he killed several components such as Neutron and Nova and they are resurrected. Then he demoed rolling upgrade of Horizon and it worked flawlessly. I think this one of the most flawless demos I’ve ever seen. (Watch a video of the demo below)

“We’ve seen the power of Kubernetes first hand in the OpenStack community,” said Mark Collier, Chief Operating Officer at OpenStack Foundation. “Our recent OpenStack User Survey showed that Kubernetes is a popular method of managing apps on OpenStack clouds. We are excited that CoreOS is helping to bring together the Kubernetes and OpenStack communities and contributing their extensive container expertise.”

Some of the benefits that CoreOS brings to enterprise customers with Stackanetes are:

• Simplified lifecycle management of OpenStack services from deployments to upgrades
• Single platform for consistently managing both IaaS and container workloads
• Ability to easily scale, operate and ensure resilience of OpenStack IaaS within their data center environments

CoreOS will work closely with the OpenStack community to integrate Stackanetes into upstream OpenStack. Polvi said, “Stackanetes is our first big stride in bringing GIFEE to the OpenStack community. With this next step of development for OpenStack on Kubernetes via Tectonic, enterprises can begin to evaluate and bring their OpenStack environments along their journey to GIFEE.”