Mirantis Introduces Bring-Your-Own-Distribution Support for Kubernetes

The company will offer SLA-backed support to enterprise development teams that choose to work with conformant and vendor-neutral distributions of Kubernetes

KubeCon Europe, Barcelona, Spain, May 22, 2019 — Today, Mirantis announced Mirantis Enterprise Support for Kubernetes, a “Bring-Your-Own-Distro” (BYOD) support offering for brownfield Kubernetes implementations.

“The idea of monetizing open source software through an opinionated, pre-packaged distribution is a construct of the IT-driven world that we lived in 20 years ago,” said Boris Renski, Mirantis co-founder and CMO. “Today we live in the developer-driven world and Kubernetes is built for developers first, and IT second. Developers don’t need a third party vendor to push a pre-packaged, opinionated Kubernetes their way. All they need is occasional high-quality support from open source software experts. This is what we aim to deliver with BYOD Kubernetes support.”

The new support option enables customers to use any conformant Kubernetes distribution and complementary technology, as long as it complies with general constraints outlined in the Mirantis service agreement.

BYOD support is a precursor to the Kubernetes-as-a-Service (KaaS) software that Mirantis will be demonstrating at KubeCon, currently in beta. Mirantis KaaS can be used to orchestrate brownfield K8s clusters and will address key challenges with running Kubernetes on-premises with pure open source software, including:

• Distribution-agnostic K8s cluster management capabilities utilizing Cluster API and Kubespray, with self-service API and web-based UI

• Control and delegate access to K8s clusters and namespaces using existing Identity Providers with IAM integration based on Keycloak

• Backend-agnostic Load Balancing and Storage capabilities for K8s through integration with OpenStack Octavia and Cinder APIs

• Native integration with Istio service mesh and Harbor image registry