Mirantis And CoreOS Launch Enterprise-Grade OpenStack And Kubernetes Integration
OpenStack company Mirantis and CoreOS today announced that they have teamed up to integration Mirantis' OpenStack distribution with CoreOS's Tectonic container platform. Together, the two companies …
Context & Ripple Effects
This announcement lands four months after CoreOS raised $12M from Google Ventures to push its enterprise-focused Tectonic platform built on Google's Kubernetes, and weeks before Tectonic reached general availability in November. For CoreOS, the Mirantis deal is a distribution channel into an established enterprise OpenStack installed base; for Mirantis, it answers the question its OpenStack customers were already asking — where containers fit alongside their clouds.
The partnership also sets up the arc the rest of the coverage traces: Mirantis followed within weeks with a $100M Intel Capital-led round and an Intel partnership aimed squarely at accelerating enterprise OpenStack adoption, while CoreOS kept pulling Kubernetes deeper into the stack.
First-order effects
- Enterprises running Mirantis' OpenStack distribution get a vendor-supported path to deploy Tectonic-managed Kubernetes alongside their clouds, removing the integration work they would otherwise own.
- CoreOS gains access to Mirantis' enterprise OpenStack customer base as a go-to-market channel at the moment Tectonic is heading toward general availability.
Second-order effects
- Other OpenStack distributors face pressure to match the pairing or risk their customers sourcing orchestration from a rival's certified stack.
- The direction of integration then flips: by 2016, CoreOS's Stackanetes used Kubernetes to deploy and manage OpenStack itself as containerized apps, turning the orchestrator from an add-on next to OpenStack into the layer above it.
Third-order effects
- Kubernetes consolidates into the neutral control plane that both partners and competitors standardize on, which ends with Red Hat paying $250M to acquire CoreOS — the container specialist absorbed by the very kind of enterprise platform company this integration was meant to serve.
- For infrastructure vendors, distribution partnerships like this one prove to be way stations: whoever owns the orchestration layer eventually owns the negotiation over the rest of the stack.
The trend: Enterprise cloud infrastructure is reorganizing around Kubernetes as the common orchestration layer, pulling OpenStack vendors, container startups, and ultimately acquirers like Red Hat into the same orbit.