Mirantis Adds Support for GCP and Ceph Storage to Container Platform
At the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America conference, Mirantis today announced it is adding support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to the managed instances of Kubernetes clusters it provides. In addition, Mirantis is also making it possible to deploy stateful applications on the open source Ceph object-based storage software.
Shaun O’Meara, field CTO at Mirantis, says the company includes a layer of abstraction that makes it possible to deploy file-based applications on top of Ceph running in the Mirantis Container Cloud to further streamline IT operations by unifying storage management.
There has been a long-standing debate over the merits of deploying stateful applications on Kubernetes clusters. That debate appears to be coming to an end as more of these applications are deployed. In theory, IT teams can develop stateless applications that store data on an external storage system. However, many organizations have embraced hyperconverged infrastructure to lower the total cost of IT by unifying the management of compute and storage. By adding Ceph support, Mirantis is making it possible to add stateful applications to a managed Kubernetes service that the company touts as being “ZeroOps” in the sense that many routine management tasks have been automated.
The Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (MKE) that is at the core of Mirantis Container Cloud can already be deployed in the cloud, on-premises or at the edge. Support for GCP provides another cloud option alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
On top of those platforms, Mirantis makes available a suite of ZeroOps services to manage everything from Kubernetes and OpenStack to continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms and rapid web application deployment tools. Those services are enabled by an open source Lagoon platform that analyzes how an application is constructed using containers on a local desktop or in a Git repository. Lagoon, gained by Mirantis following its acquisition of amazee.io earlier this year, automatically invokes the application programming interfaces (APIs) required to deploy an application on a Kubernetes cluster.
It’s not clear how much IT organizations will embrace ZeroOps to build and deploy applications, but more abstraction layers in the form of frameworks are making it simpler to build and deploy applications on Kubernetes clusters. Automation, of course, has always been at the core of any DevOps initiative. The issue that organizations are struggling with now is the degree to which they want to manage DevOps platforms themselves versus relying on the expertise of an external service provider.
Regardless of approach, the one thing that is certain is the management of Kubernetes environments is becoming more automated using a set of DevOps best practices. As that trend continues, the platform itself will become more accessible to a wider range of organizations. As such, IT teams should expect the number of cloud-native applications deployed on Kubernetes clusters to exponentially expand in the year ahead.
