Latest Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes Adds Security, Enhances Usability, and Storage Management

Mirantis announced an update to Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes (MOSK) that delivers early access to production-grade OpenStack Yoga, delivers new security features, improves backups and storage management – making it easier than ever to run resilient OpenStack clouds at scale.

MOSK hardens the open source OpenStack as the basis for mission-critical operations. It removes the typical challenges of OpenStack cluster deployment and operations with an easy-to-use virtualization platform – containerized and optimally configured for Kubernetes. MOSK enables digital infrastructure for cloud native and traditional applications which ensures reliability and enables full control over data. MOSK provides centralized logging, monitoring, and alerting, along with tooling to automate management of the underlying infrastructure, from server provisioning to software configuration.

“Hardening the open source base requires significant time and effort to ensure our customers have a deployable, reliable distribution on which they can base their mission-critical operations,” said Roman Zhnichkov, director of engineering, Mirantis. “The new security-related enhancements and ease-of-use features continue our focus on providing our customers with the most secure infrastructure possible, while simplifying their day-to-day operations.”

The MOSK update also adds a number of enhancements to continue to reduce operational burdens, making running enterprise OpenStack infrastructure simpler, less error-prone, and requiring less time than before. For example:

• Support for the Cloud Auditing Data Federation (CADF) specification is added for all core MOSK services – compute (Nova), block storage (Cinder), images (Glance), networking (Neutron), orchestration (Heat), DNS (Designate), bare metal (Ironic), and load balancing (Octavia). This enhances security by providing full transparency to see who is doing what in the compute infrastructure and maintain that data for audit and threat analysis.
• A Security Guide that provides extensive instructions for all common security-related needs. It will help users navigate and utilize all the security features available in MOSK.
• A technical preview of OpenStack Yoga and Tungsten Fabric 21.4, providing the opportunity to preview and validate this new release in the customer’s own data center. Full production of OpenStack Yoga in MOSK is planned for the 22.5 release later this year.

In addition, Mirantis has made it easier to evaluate MOSK with the introduction of TryMOSK. Leveraging the Equinix Metal platform, it shortcuts the process of OpenStack cloud design and deployment, and especially its most complicated steps: hardware provisioning and configuration and network infrastructure setup, which typically takes several experienced engineers at least a week to set up.