Mirantis containerises OpenContrail within OpenStack ecosystem

Active OpenStack contributor, Mirantis, has containerised OpenContrail. Containerising and supporting OpenContrail will help the California-based company grow into a ‘onestop support shop’ for all popular open source technologies used with OpenStack.

OpenContrail is a widely used SDN platform that simplifies OpenStack cloud management for administrators. The rate at which software-defined networking is evolving, administrators may soon have to develop skillsets specifically for OpenContrail. The platform works as an extensible system for cloud networking and network function virtualisation. This would help Mirantis grow its presence in the OpenStack world.

“OpenContrail is an essential project within the OpenStack community, and Mirantis is smart to containerise and commercially support it. The work our team is doing will make it easy to scale and update OpenContrail and perform seamless rolling upgrades alongside the rest of Mirantis OpenStack,” said Jakub Pavlik, Mirantis’ director of engineering and OpenContrail advisory board member. Recently, Mirantis acquired TCP Cloud. This acquisition is expected to enable managed services for OpenContrail, Kubernetes and OpenStack. The commercial support by Mirantis will also make OpenContrail compatible with a number of network switches.

According to a recent IDC report, the SDN market will be valued at US$ 12.5 billion by 2020. Mirantis could use OpenContrail to launch itself in this space.

Licensed under Apache 2.0, OpenContrail is built using standard protocols. The open source project has all the necessary components for networking virtualisation. It has an SDN controller, an analytics engine, published northbound APIs and a virtual router.