NEW! Mirantis Academy -   Learn confidently with expert guidance and On-demand content.   Learn More

Mirantis DriveTrain
Lifecycle Management

Flexible, Predictable Cloud Deployment

Mirantis Cloud Platform Components

Historically, businesses have treated IT infrastructure as something that is designed and deployed once, and then rarely changes.

But today, to remain competitive you need your private cloud infrastructure to be flexible and responsive to evolving workload and business requirements.

In the public cloud, that’s easy; hard tasks such as hardware provisioning, network orchestration, back-up, security, they’re all handled for you.

But what about on-prem? Do you go with VMware and pay the vTax on your workloads, or do you take your chances with a DIY solution?

Or do you take the third option, and address this challenge by treating your infrastructure just like your applications, with workflows and tooling that allow you to deliver change efficiently, continuously and safely.

DriveTrain is the heart of Mirantis Cloud Platform (MCP), giving you the flexibility to adapt your private cloud to on-the-ground application reality without significant investment in professional services. You can continuously tune the services, versions, configuration, and topology of your clouds to suit the changing needs of your business – all while delivering critical updates with minimal interruption.

DriveTrain is an infrastructure-as-code system that helps you build and manage the continuous delivery pipelines that automate the management and maintenance of your private cloud infrastructure.

DriveTrain helps you deliver the best open-source technology for your business, and then uses automation to stage, test, scale, and safely upgrade your infrastructure to the latest features and versions when you’re ready – including, for example, the latest Kubernetes and OpenStack releases.

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)

DriveTrain uses an infrastructure-as-code approach with your private clouds, just like the public cloud providers, helping you to reduce the cost of manual steps and the risk of delivering change quickly.

You can fully automate the delivery, testing and maintenance of your infrastructure so you can achieve efficient, day-2 operations, zero-downtime upgrades, and stay current with the latest open source features and fixes.

With DriveTrain, you can manage your private clouds with:

  • Code – programmatic deployment/changes

  • Automation – continuous integration, delivery, and validation

  • Control – configuration change auditing

DriveTrain employs a set of structurally-simple, code-based hierarchical models (plus curated packages) stored in Git and Aptly repos, reviewed with Gerrit, and deployed by Salt under the command of Jenkins pipelines.

This approach simplifies consumption and integration of new technology, permits flexible, use-case driven customization and enables smooth updates with fully-automated, upgrades to working clouds.

JOIN MODEL DESIGNER BETA

Tuned Stacks – Best Practices

Portability and re-use of abstract configuration elements saves you cost and time. DriveTrain helps you create and manage a portfolio of workload-centric cloud configurations – “tuned stacks” that describe the best deployment for development, test, and production on common infrastructure. MCP includes pre-configured, tuned stacks based on real-world, customer use cases that can get you started quickly.

LEARN ABOUT MCP EDGE

Cloud Infrastructure Lifecycle Management

With DriveTrain, you can manage the lifecycle of your infrastructure from all angles, adapting quickly to the fast-changing needs of your business.

Mirantis DriveTrain gives you the automated delivery, staging, and validation pipelines for in-service updates, and large-scale upgrades such as major version upgrades of Kubernetes, OpenStack, and Tungsten Fabric SDN; letting you enjoy new technology benefits without the need for significant downtime or risk of production cloud destabilization.

MCP DriveTrain LCM

MCP Lifecycle Management Demo

MCP Lifecycle Management – Updates

What I’m particularly proud of… is that the cloud itself is provided as infrastructure as code. So it’s not that we go over there and install a node manually, everything is done automatically, including network, including Ceph… and this helps us a lot speeding up the process of rolling out.

— Tilman Schulz, System Analyst, Volkswagen Group

Continuous Integration

When you introduce new code, you need to make sure that everything is tightly integrated and functioning as expected. DriveTrain’s CI pipelines helps you follow software development practices by testing integrations before delivery – so you can take advantage of open source innovation, leverage new hardware capabilities, and develop new solutions without having to rip-and-replace existing infrastructure. Mirantis continually implements new, hardened features into MCP – and DriveTrain gives you the flexibility to deliver new capabilities on your terms.

Continuous Validation

When you make changes or updates to your deployments, you need to know your clouds are working as expected and your users are not impacted. DriveTrain’s Cloud Validation Pipeline helps you run health check and sanity tests against components of MCP to verify consistency of configuration and basic component functions. And in the event that something goes wrong, you can simply roll back the changes before your users are impacted.

Continuous Delivery

To stay competitive and give your developers the flexibility they need, you need to move fast. DriveTrain’s CD pipelines help you get new features in front of your end users quickly by automatically staging deployment to production while maintaining overall environment integrity. DriveTrain empowers predictable delivery of applications and infrastructure adaptations, as well as fully-automated in-service upgrades, so your business can gain the benefits faster. This includes upgrades to the latest releases of OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Mirantis OpenContrail.

Continous Control

DriveTrain’s infrastructure-as-code approach lets you apply agile software development best practices to your cloud infrastructure, where changes are requested by admins, reviewed by the environment operators for approval, then merged with the deployment; all while being logged each step of the way for easy auditing, and rollback as needed.

Key
Benefits

  • Flexibility to harness the latest innovation – stay close to the latest open-source technology and avoid waiting for massive upgrades by delivering new releases and fixes immediately.

  • Get the most from your unique infrastructure investments – continuously tune your infrastructure to drive efficiency and respond to changing needs of your workloads.

  • Avoid costly mistakes – push change gradually, validate, and rollback when needed.

Looking for additional details about the components of Mirantis products?

VIEW COMPONENT MATRIX