Mirantis Acquires TCP Cloud For Continuous Delivery

Business cloud developer and vendor Mirantis has agreed to acquire Prague-based TCP Cloud and said it would include the firm’s MK.20 technology in the next release of Mirantis’ Fuel software.

The technology provides incremental updates to customers’ on-premises cloud infrastructure, meaning new features are delivered continuously without the need for major upgrades, Mirantis said.

No upgrades needed

The Silicon Valley company was one of the co-founders of the OpenStack Foundation in 2012 and is one of the platform’s major developers. It sells an OpenStack distribution that competes with those of IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, HPE and others.

Fuel is an OpenStack toolkit for deploying and managing OpenStack clouds, allowing organisations to handle setup, configuration and validation of infrastructure features through a graphical interface.

OpenStack aims to release major updates every six months, but TCP Cloud’s MK.20 eliminates the need for those updates by instead providing continuous delivery of new features, the company said.

The model is the same used by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others to maintain their cloud infrastructure, according to Mirantis.

Kubernetes containers

The company said it plans to use the technology as part of an initiative with Google and Intel to deliver OpenStack using the Google-developed Kubernetes container manager.

The company said TCP Cloud’s work on MK.20 was about nine months ahead of its own research. TCP Cloud is Mirantis’ first acquisition.

“Mirantis empowers enterprises to embrace the new, continuously delivered infrastructure model on their terms,” stated Mirantis chief executive Alex Freedland. “TCP Cloud’s technology and expertise helps us accelerate that vision.”

MK.20 is to be integrated into Fuel as part of the next release of Mirantis OpenStack.

Cloud provider Rackspace said last month it had reached one billion server hours with OpenStack clouds, indicating the platform’s popularity.

Rackspace launched the OpenStack initiative along with NASA in 2010 in order to help organisations offer clouds running on standard server hardware.

The technology’s users include AT&T, the BBC, BMW, CERN, eBay, PayPal and Yahoo.

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