Mirantis launched an integrated cloud platform that supports virtual machines using OpenStack, containers using Kubernetes, and bare metal, all on the same cloud.

The Mirantis Cloud Platform (MCP) reflects an industry-wide shift in how companies buy and manage infrastructure software, said Boris Renski, Mirantis co-founder and CMO.

“People are not going to be buying infrastructure software going forward,” Renski said. “People are going to be buying the cloud service. Today the infrastructure industry is defined by public clouds. It’s a completely different paradigm where everything at the platform level is API driven, it’s managed for you, and you use the outcome that the software empowers.”

Renski previously declared that “infrastructure software is dead.”

Selling subscriptions to software infrastructure and then updating this software with major upgrades every six months is an outdated business model, Renski added. To this end, the Mirantis Cloud Platform will update in minor increments on a weekly basis.

“The customer will be getting a continuous steam of small incremental patches,” Renski explained. “We are doing away with the forklift upgrade.”

Mirantis is also introducing a new delivery model for the cloud platform that it calls a “build-operate-transfer delivery model.” The company will operate the platform for customers for 12 months, at which point it will transfer the platform to the customer’s DevOps team, allowing the customer to run the platform independently, if they want to do so.

The company built StackLight, an operations support system (OSS), for MCP. It provides continuous monitoring for SLA compliance, whether Mirantis is managing the customer’s cloud, or the customer is managing MCP in-house.

“As part of our Build-Operate-Transfer model, we focus on operational training with StackLight such that post-transfer you are able to use the same in-place StackLight and same in-place standard operating procedures,” Mirantis’ Jim Sangster wrote in a company blog post about the new Mirantis Cloud Platform.

While MPC will continue to support OpenStack, the launch of the new platform also signals the end of life for Mirantis OpenStack (MOS) and Fuel. This will happen by September 2019, and the company says it will work with customers currently using MOS to transition them to MCP.

The combined platform also reflects the growing popularity of containers using Kubernetes. Mirantis, a longtime OpenStack integrator, initially began offering Kubernetes software in July 2016.

“I don’t want anyone to get this impression OpenStack is dead,” Renski said. “We historically have been — and remain — an OpenStack-focused company. Over 90 percent of our business today is focused exclusively on OpenStack.”

But, he admitted, Kubernetes and containers are sexy.

“Kubernetes is a new paradigm,” Renski said. “It definitely has the wow and cool factor that supersedes the boring OpenStack, which was the cool thing two years ago. But from the standpoint of usage, both virtual machines and containers are going to be here for a long time. Us embracing Kubernetes is just us following the need for people to supplement their VM infrastructure with container infrastructure as opposed to us dumping OpenStack and pivoting everything into Kubernetes.”