Whether enterprises are orchestrating workloads in on-premises data centers or servers in edge locations, the full potential of running containers in the cloud remains to be seen as bare metal management is manual, slow, siloed, and expensive. But, in the final weeks of a very long march, Mirantis and Platform9 have given enterprises something to smile about, as each of the vendors released their own versions of fully-managed, bare metal orchestration platforms. 

"If you think of the trends and the infrastructure management space in the way they're evolving, it's about automation, especially as enterprises are needing to manage infrastructure at scale that is distributed geographically,” said Madhura Maskasky, co-founder and VP of product at Platform9. 

Platform9 this week launched its Managed Bare Metal platform, which it boldly calls “the industry’s only cloud-ready [software-as-a-service]  managed bare metal orchestration platform.” 

The edge-focused managed service provider has a proven expertise at building and helping to operate Kubernetes-based systems at the edge – which Liz Rice, chair of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) technical operating committee, ranked the second leading trend for 2021.

Maskasky said that many enterprises are looking for a managed platform, like Platform9’s, because they can install and deploy it on native bare metal. “We enable integration with existing technology and enable a single sign-on,” she explained, adding that the managed Kubernetes platform supports containers and virtual machines. 

The vendor's managed SaaS model allows customers to remotely take control of bare metal hardware once it is racked and stacked, powered up, and given an identity to deploy an operating system and configure networking without physical interaction to the infrastructure, she added. 

“We don't just stop at providing Kubernetes, but we provide all the key technologies that are needed to typically automate data center deployments, including the underlying infrastructure, but also workloads that run on it,” Maskasky said.

Mirantis last week unwrapped its OpenStack for Kubernetes product that make it easier to deploy, manage, and update OpenStack on Kubernetes-managed containers. It’s a containerized version of the open source infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud that makes it possible to deploy OpenStack on either a virtual machine (VM) or on a bare metal server. 

“It basically enables customers to pave all their infrastructure with Kubernetes,” said John Allwright, VP of marketing at Mirantis. “Up to this point, OpenStack was kind of its own thing, its own kind of siloed stack that people were getting a lot of value from in creating their own private clouds and either providing that service internally or externally to customers.”

"We now enable them to have the best of both worlds,” Allwright added. 

Customers turn to Kubernetes as their infrastructure primitive, running everywhere, but then also have the OpenStack workload and dial tone running on the Kubernetes infrastructure, Allwright explained. This approach enables OpenStack on either a VM or on a bare metal server. 

On-premises environments have traditionally relied on OpenStack for a virtualization platform, but as the maturing Kubernetes continues to evolve and slowly move on-premises, Mirantis’ approach to the convergence of the two platform effectively turns OpenStack components into  cloud-native extensions on Kubernetes.

Following its acquisition of Docker Enterprise last year, Allwright said the vendor took the opportunity to “bring everything together” – everything being its acquired assets that include Mirantis Container Cloud, formerly known as Docker Enterprise Container Cloud and Lens’ multi-cluster management tool – into its newly dubbed Mirantis Cloud Native Platform. 

Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes is just the first in a series of updates that the vendor has planned for the new cloud-native platform.

According to Allwright, enterprises are trying to get away from virtualization vendors and considering Kubernetes on bare metal and managing that whole stack with container cloud. 

“We are one of the few vendors that isn't tied back to a larger product portfolio, whether that's a hyperscale cloud or virtualization product set operating system,” Allwright said. “So customers like to go with us if they have an open source strategy. We’re the closest they can get to pure open source with commercial support behind it.”

But Platform9 would argue while it’s true that enterprises are trying to get away from virtualization vendors, they’re also trying to manage less infrastructure.  

“Even as you look at the Mirantis announcement around OpenStack on Kubernetes, it's still talking about a Kubernetes and OpenStack environment that one needs to deploy on-premise and that means containerization makes it easy to do, but still leaves quite a bit of that burden on the end users,” said Platform9's Maskasky.

“That’s the challenge Platform9 fundamentally solves through the SaaS model.” Maskasky said, adding that as far as the Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes goes, “that fundamentally has always been our biggest differentiating factor and why we've repeatedly seen customers from Mirantis or other OpenStack vendors migrating over to Platform9.”