Streamlined OpenStack Management on Kubernetes: Introducing Rockoon by Mirantis

Mirantis is proud to announce Rockoon, a new open project that marks a significant step in our commitment to the open source community. Following our pledge at KubeCon in Paris last year to double down on open source, Rockoon represents our first step towards bringing the benefits of Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes (MOSK), a product with over four years of market validation, to everyone who’s excited about OpenStack.
Why Rockoon?
In light of recent market shifts, such as Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, there is strongly renewed interest in OpenStack as an open source alternatives to costly proprietary solutions. Mirantis recognizes the growing demand for accessible and efficient tools to manage OpenStack environments, and we believe that MOSK and Rockoon answer that call. As promised, Rockoon (name derives from rocket + balloon) is our holiday present to the OpenStack community, offering a streamlined way to deploy and manage OpenStack services on Kubernetes.
Rockoon is a Kubernetes controller that serves as the central component of Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes. It focuses on simplifying complex operational routines, allowing admins to manage OpenStack as a unified system, rather than a collection of disparate services. By leveraging OpenStack Helm charts, Rockoon offers a high-level abstraction layer, preventing common issues encountered with OpenStack Helm in production and ensuring reliability at scale.
Why run OpenStack on Kubernetes?
Kubernetes significantly enhances OpenStack environments by improving operability, simplifying networking, enhancing resilience, enabling scalability, and optimizing lifecycle management. Kubernetes provides a unified API for managing OpenStack cluster configurations and lifecycle operations, abstracts complex networking tasks, supports self-healing processes, and facilitates smarter upgrades and orchestration to minimize impact on cloud workloads. Widespread adoption of Kubernetes ensures access to a robust ecosystem of tools and best practices, accelerating deployment, monitoring, and troubleshooting.
What sets Rockoon apart is its focus on real-world enterprise needs.? It simplifies operations by providing a stable, versioned abstraction over OpenStack Helm APIs, shielding users from upstream changes. Rockoon treats OpenStack as a holistic system, streamlining control and coordination across all components. Focusing on long-term operations, Rockoon ensures years of production-grade stability and consistency for enterprise OpenStack environments.
How to get started
The Rockoon GitHub repository includes everything needed to get started. Rockoon can run on modest hardware, such as laptops or VMs, making it ideal for development and evaluation. A deployment script automates the setup of a fully functional OpenStack cluster on Kubernetes, optimized for the k0s distribution but compatible with other environments. Every commit to the repository undergoes automated testing to ensure stability and reliability.
Check out theRockoon GitHub Repository to get started. Dive into the code, review the documentation, and join us in shaping the future of OpenStack on Kubernetes. Together, let’s drive innovation and build a stronger, open cloud infrastructure ecosystem.
Rockoon is just the beginning of Mirantis’ renewed commitment to open source. We are dedicated to publishing more OpenStack components and strengthening our open -source portfolio. We invite you to explore the project, provide feedback, and contribute through the Rockoon GitHub repository.