Latest Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes Delivers Support for Centrally-Managed, Distributed Edge Deployments

Mirantis announced the availability of Mirantis OpenStack 21.4 that includes a number of important enhancements which enable enterprises to support a broader range of deployment options, extend private clouds over public networks and provide long-term support for OpenStack Victoria.

Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes is a containerized version of the open-source infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform chosen by enterprises across industries and geographies to build some of the largest and best-performing private clouds in the world. Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes provides a feature-rich, mature environment for hosting both legacy apps and modern use cases such as Network Functions Virtualization, mobile network operations, and large-scale scientific computing. It simplifies operations by leveraging Kubernetes to ensure configurability, resilience, robustness and seamless updates for OpenStack.

“The latest release of OpenStack creates a number of unique challenges due to the constraints for the deployment of a sufficiently scaled data center, in terms of space, power, cooling and other related factors, as well as the management of distributed data-center clusters,” said Adam Parco, Mirantis CTO. “Traditional distributed management solutions have been relatively resource-heavy when compared to that available in a small edge data center, making such a deployment less than viable.”

Mirantis OpenStack 21.4 enables support for centrally managed, distributed edge deployments. As companies move to modernizing their IT infrastructure there are requirements to distribute portions of the data center compute or storage infrastructure at the edge, as close to their users, or as close to the source of the data, as possible. Mirantis OpenStack makes edge deployments viable because it needs half the nodes required for a traditional deployment and centralizes management of distributed, remote resources.

Mirantis OpenStack 21.4 also enables support for interconnecting multiple private data centers over public infrastructure using BGP-based VPNs when using Open vSwitch-based clouds, which increases the flexibility and options available to data-center operators with distributed sites. While interconnectivity with BGP-base VPN has been available previously through other OpenStack plug-in technologies, it added significant complexity in configuration and management. By extending support for BGP VPNs to vSwitch, general-purpose Infrastructure as a Service benefits from the same set of VPN connectivity across public networks, without adding complexity.

Other new features and enhancements include:

• Support for large deployments based on Open vSwitch: Support has been added for large-scale deployments that number up to 200 nodes, allowing customers to deploy Mirantis OpenStack into larger-scale environments as their business demands continue to grow.
• Default policy override for core OpenStack services: A mechanism that defines additional policy rules for the core OpenStack services through the OpenStack Deployment Custom Resource. This enhancement, when combined with OpenStack domain mechanisms, enables the ability to build “sandboxes” for multi-tenant operation where individual “tenants” within a OpenStack deployment can have their own isolated spaces without risk of impacting other “tenants.”
• Automatic evacuation of VMs from failed hosts: Based on OpenStack Masakari, the host monitor is deployed by default with Instances High Availability Service for OpenStack to provide automatic instance evacuation from failed instances, providing an increased level of resiliency for deployments.
• Cinder backend for Glance – Generic iSCSI: For customers that rely on external storage appliances to implement block storage, the newly supported Cinder backend for Glance allows presenting Cinder volumes as Glance images and snapshots, using the same storage appliance for all the persistent data in the cloud.
• OpenStack Victoria LTS: OpenStack Victoria LTS with OVS now has LTS status, and full support is provided for OpenStack Victoria with Tungsten Fabric 5.1 for both greenfield and new deployments. This LTS support ensures that our customers have a solid, supported base for their deployments.