Mirantis Forms OpenStack Contributions Team

Mirantis creates dedicated engineering team to develop strategic OpenStack features for open source community.

Mountain View, California, September 19, 2012 – Mirantis, a leader in engineering services for OpenStack™ cloud infrastructure, today said that it is establishing a dedicated OpenStack contributions team. The company made the announcement today as OpenStack is spun off into an independent Foundation.

This Mirantis team will include a pool of five engineers exclusively dedicated to working on strategic and significant OpenStack features and contributing them to the open source community.

OpenStack is an open source platform for building private and public infrastructure clouds. It originated with NASA and Rackspace in 2010. Since then, more than 185 leading companies and 3300 engineers have joined the OpenStack community. In 2011, Rackspace announced that it would transition management of OpenStack to an independent Foundation in 2012. Mirantis is one of the founding members of the Foundation, having pledged its support when it was first announced. Since then, the company has been elected to the Foundation board and has been actively evangelizing the OpenStack community.

“We’ve been very active in promoting the OpenStack community via blogs, hosting meetups, and through conference presentations,” noted Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis. “There is great demand for OpenStack services from our customers, but we believe it is important to dedicate a group of our most talented engineers to strategic OpenStack feature development.”

The new OpenStack development team will continue Mirantis’ work on Load-Balancer-as-a-Service functionalityfor OpenStack which may eventually be merged with the Quantum project. So far, Mirantis’ load balancer work has generated considerable community interest with Cisco, PayPal, HP, F5, Riverbed, and a number of others pledging support for the LBaaSproject.

“We want to contribute more to the newly launched Foundation than just funding by providing meaningful and strategic code contributions,” continued Renski.

The OpenStack Foundation will facilitate broad industry support and provide shared resources to protect, empower, and promote OpenStack software and the community, as well as a permanent legal home for OpenStack. It will provide services, such as large-scale software testing, tools to assist developers, event management for the bi-annual summit meetings and regional conferences, legal support, educational resources, promotion of the OpenStack brand and the ecosystem.