Mirantis eyes continuous integration of all the things

And waits for news on how OpenStack will govern its new outreach plans

OPENSTACK SYDNEY Mirantis is contemplating a future as a provider of continuous integration (CI) tools and continuous-delivery-as-a-service.

Speaking to El Reg at the OpenStack summit in Sydney, Mirantis co-founder and CMO Boris Renski said the company's DriveTrain CI tool is “our main product now”.

The company developed DriveTrain to deliver a continuously integrated OpenStack distribution, Renski said that's been well-received, as users appreciate the chance to consume frequent updates to access new functionality and/or security updates in their OpenStack rigs.

Mirantis therefore thinks it can do a similar job for other combinations of open source software and that users will welcome such oft-updated bundles as anything that makes developers more productive, and infrastructure more secure, should be welcome.

Renski said Mirantis is yet to decide what “payloads” it will feed into DriveTrain, but that once those decision have been in coming months made the company will offer continuous delivery services to world+dog. That's a shift from the company's current position as a consultancy packaging and supporting OpenStack, but one Renski feels is necessary and likely to be lucrative.

Renski also shared his thoughts on OpenStack's plans to foster integration tools that make the stack more interoperable. While applauding the move, Renski – who also sits on the board of the OpenStack Foundation – expressed concern that the governance model for the new initiative is yet to be decided. The lack of a clear framework, he said, is important given the new plan represents the first time the OpenStack foundation will put its resources into projects beyond core OpenStack and into use cases other than private clouds.

Red Hat representatives shared similar concerns with The Register.

In conversation with The Register, OpenStack Foundation executive director Jonathan Bryce shrugged off those concerns by saying the organisation works best when it shares ideas and lets its community define their governance. Operating in this way, he said encourages more participants in projects.

He added that the Foundation also felt it would be hard to define governance for the new effort before it starts work, as its ambition to make OpenStack work better on the edge and with containers means it may be necessary to work with complementary organisations like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Rather than write rules that make such collaborations hard, Bryce said the OpenStack Foundation will let its own effort evolve and then figure out how it should operate. ®