How Mirantis Helps Companies Control Their Own Destinies Through Open Source
At Equinix, we like to believe that most of our customers come to us because they find value in our services. It would be a stretch, though, to say that every business that uses Equinix data centers or infrastructure shares our core philosophical principles.
Around the same period big tech companies were being spooked by open source—Steve Ballmer’s famous “Linux is a cancer” interview happened in 2001—Mirantis was building a business helping companies use open source to their advantage. The company, one of whose early wins was helping PayPal stand up and migrate its entire operation onto a massive OpenStack cloud, is still at it.
"Our roots and our focus are heavily buried in the open source community space," Shaun O'Meara, Field CTO at Mirantis, says. "We are and always have been massive contributors to open source."
Things have changed since two decades ago, obviously. It’s been nearly 10 years since Microsoft (now a huge user of and contributor to open source projects) declared that it "loves Linux." Public clouds rule the day, and containers and Kubernetes, designed specifically for running software in the cloud, are the de facto standard approach to architecting modern applications.
Mirantis’ product focus has changed with the times, too, while continuing to center around open source. The company now enables a "ZeroOps" approach to running OpenStack and Kubernetes, among other open source solutions.
Taking the Pain Out of Open Source
From its very beginning, Mirantis’ mission has been to help businesses navigate the complexities of open source, so that they could take full advantage of software whose code was freely available, even if it was rough around the edges. It started by doing this as a consultancy, but in the 2000s, it started building products that would automate the deployment and management of open source software.
Mirantis first focused on OpenStack, the go-to for folks looking for an open source private cloud infrastructure solution. More than a few major companies, PayPal included, then turned to Mirantis for help making their first move into the cloud.
"We were building private cloud solutions before they were even being called private cloud solutions," O'Meara notes.
Today Mirantis OpenStack runs on Kubernetes, and the company also provides a standalone Kubernetes distribution, k0s, designed as an easy way to get cloud-native environments up and running. In 2019 Mirantis bought Docker Enterprise and the following year it acquired Lens Kubernetes IDE, taking an even more central role in the realm of open source cloud native software.
To build test environments and ensure that its many solutions work reliably wherever they are deployed–including in massive, multiple-thousand-server private clouds–Mirantis relies on bare metal servers provided by Equinix Metal. The Equinix platform gives it the ability to spin up dedicated server instances at massive scale– it’s not uncommon for Mirantis to launch as many as 1,500 Metal servers in a single cluster for peak testing. The company can add or spin down servers on demand, as its capacity needs change. Metal provides Mirantis' developers and QA teams with complete control over the infrastructure, so they can tweak important variables as they build and test their software.
"Equinix gives us full visibility into our environment so we can do high-end testing," O'Meara says, noting that his teams wouldn't enjoy the same visibility using shared, virtualized servers in the public cloud, which "probably couldn't give us as many servers as we need on demand anyway."
In particular, Mirantis benefits from having full control over Layer 2 networking between nodes, making it possible to validate and stress test complex networking configurations within private cloud solutions. It can also leverage advanced NICs (SmartNICs) and hardware accelerators to ensure that bespoke bare metal hardware used by its customers is compatible with its software.
Bare metal infrastructure is also essential for Mirantis because the company's CI/CD and testing routines require it to "create virtualization layers within virtualization layers," O'Meara says, another task that wouldn't be practical using public cloud VMs.
This hassle-free access to high-end infrastructure helps Mirantis take the "pain out of having to look after infrastructure" for its customers, O'Meara says.
Empowering Companies to Control Their Destinies
Mirantis has ambitions to expand into even more corners of the open source space.
One future area of focus, according to O'Meara, will be confidential computing. The company hopes to help organizations with very strict data security and privacy needs to take full advantage of open source.
Meanwhile, Mirantis continues building solutions that reduce the hassle of running OpenStack and Kubernetes, for example, by simplifying governance needs.
This is all part of Mirantis' mission to enable ZeroOps, which is "more than a tag line for us. It's an ethos," as O'Meara is keen to point out.
He adds that, ultimately, Mirantis wants to ensure that every business can "control its own destiny" by using software of its choosing to build cloud environments of its choosing. "People who want control of their destiny want private clouds. They want to be able to spin nodes up and down when they want, to see into the network when they want, to control cost models as they want," he says. Mirantis is committed to continuing to build solutions that enable any organization to do just that.
Published on
12 July 2023Interview by
Katie Norchi
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