Mirantis has open sourced Rockoon, a project that simplifies OpenStack management on Kubernetes. Rockoon is not a new project but has been used within Mirantis OpenStack on Kubernetes for years. It was originally developed to facilitate seamless OpenStack upgrades, enabling organizations to continuously update their deployments without service disruption. In this episode, Randy Bias, VP of Open Source Strategy and Technology at Mirantis, discusses Rockoon’s role in OpenStack lifecycle management, its origins, and the company’s broader open source philosophy.

Rockoon was designed as a native Kubernetes controller to orchestrate both the control plane and data plane of OpenStack. Bias highlights its ability to integrate with Kubernetes’ existing architecture, which can improve scalability, and live migration while simplifying the management of OpenStack components. Bias discusses how the lessons learned from Rockoon’s development have also influenced Mirantis’ enterprise Kubernetes offering, Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (MKE).

Bias tells us that open sourcing Rockoon aims to give the community a reliable way to manage OpenStack at scale, reducing technical debt and operational complexity. Highlighting the company’s vision, Bias shares, “We just wanted to make it easier for everybody to run OpenStack at scale, to upgrade it easily, and manage the full lifecycle seamlessly.”

Besides the technical benefits, Bias highlights the strategic importance of open sourcing Rockoon. One motivation was to reassure Mirantis customers that all elements of Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes (MOSK) are now fully open source. Making Rockoon publicly available also ensures that the wider ecosystem can benefit from its capabilities. Bias talks about how this is helping to address long-standing challenges in OpenStack lifecycle management.

Mirantis’ approach contrasts with other open source players who have moved toward more opinionated, restrictive models. Bias underscores the company’s commitment to unopinionated stacks, which aims to give enterprises greater flexibility to build cloud-native and AI-powered applications on their own terms. Rather than locking customers into predefined solutions, Mirantis enables them to assemble the open source components that best fit their needs. Bias says that Mirantis doesn’t want any vendor lock-in for customers. “We want customers to have full control and ownership of their own future,” explains Bias.

In addition to Mirantis’ open source efforts, the company continues to offer commercial support for enterprises through solutions like Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes (MOSK). Bias shares that discussions are ongoing with the Open Infrastructure Foundation about placing Rockoon under its umbrella. However, the priority right now is making the technology available and gathering community feedback.

Guest: Randy Bias (LinkedIn)
Company: Mirantis
Show: Open Source Means Business

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.