Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack company, today announced a collaboration with Google and Intel to evolve the architecture of the leading purpose-built lifecycle management tool for OpenStack, Fuel, and related OpenStack projects, to enable for use of Kubernetes as its underlying orchestration engine. The companies will work with the OpenStack community to package OpenStack into Docker containers to be managed by Kubernetes. The companies will jointly discuss the details of this collaboration at the upcoming OpenStack Days Silicon Valley on August 9-10.

The resulting software will give users fine grain control over the placement of services used for the OpenStack control plane and the ability to do rolling updates of OpenStack, make the OpenStack control plane self-healing and more resilient, and smooth the path for the creating of microservices-based applications on OpenStack.

"With the emergence of Docker as the standard container image format and Kubernetes as the standard for container orchestration, we are finally seeing continuity in how people approach operations of distributed applications. Combining Kubernetes and Fuel will open OpenStack up to a new delivery model that allows faster consumption of updates, helping customers get to outcomes faster." -- Mirantis CMO, Boris Renski

"Leveraging Kubernetes in Fuel will turn OpenStack into a true microservice application, bridging the gap between legacy infrastructure software and the next generation of application development. Many enterprises will benefit from using containers and sophisticated cluster management as the foundation for resilient, highly scalable infrastructure." -- Google Senior Product Manager, Craig McLuckie

"Combined open source leadership of Intel and Mirantis will be instrumental in bridging the OpenStack and Kubernetes communities. Our joint efforts will marry two complementary and powerful open source communities, making it simpler for enterprises to manage private clouds." -- Intel VP & GM, Software Defined Infrastructure Group, Jonathan Donaldson

To further support Kubernetes on OpenStack, Mirantis will become an active contributor to the Kubernetes project, aiming to become a top contributor over the next year. Mirantis has also joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, ​a Linux Foundation project and organization dedicated to advancing the development of cloud native applications and services, as a Silver member.