Mirantis Forms OpenStack Contributions Team

Mirantis, headquartered in Mountain View, California,, recently announced the establishment of a dedicated OpenStack contributions team. The company, which has engineering centers in Russia and Ukraine, provides engineering services for OpenStack cloud infrastructure.

OpenStack software is a massively scalable cloud operating system for public or private clouds, produced by an open source community. The Mirantis team will include a pool of five engineers exclusively dedicated to working on strategic and significant OpenStack features and contributing them to the open source community.

"We’ve been very active in supporting the OpenStack community via blogs, hosting meetups, and through conference presentations,” said Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis. "There is great demand for OpenStack services from our customers, but we believe it is important to dedicate a group of our most talented engineers to strategic OpenStack feature development." Mirantis delivers OpenStack cloud and open source application infrastructure, helping service providers, SaaS vendors and enterprises build and run robust OpenStack cloud infrastructure. Customers include Cisco, Dell, GE, Agilent, NASA, The Gap, Axcient, and Nexenta.

Originated with NASA and Rackspace, the OpenStack community has grown exponentially. And last week, the OpenStack Foundation officially launched.The recent stats released by the foundation include: 5,600 individual members from 88 countries across six continents with the top five countries being the United States, China, India, the United Kingdom and Austraila; 38 global user groups; and more than 573 developers have contributed to OpenStack since its inception, with 464 contributing in the last 12 months.

Mirantis is one of the founding members of the Foundation, having pledged its support when it was first announced. Since then, the company has been elected to the Foundation board and has been actively evangelizing the OpenStack community.

Load Balancing

The new OpenStack development team will continue Mirantis’ work on Load-Balancer-as-a-Service functionality for OpenStack (the Equilibrium project), which may eventually be merged with the Quantum project. So far, Mirantis’ load balancer work has generated considerable community interest with Cisco, PayPal, HP, F5, Riverbed and a number of others pledging support for the Equilibrium project, according to Mirantis.

“We want to contribute more to the newly launched Foundation than just funding by providing meaningful and strategic code contributions,” said Renski.