Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes rounds out 2022 with 10x growth of virtual machines and introduces new Shared Filesystems-as-a-Service

MOSK 22.5 introduces OpenStack Yoga and Shared Filesystems-as-a-Service to accelerate migration of legacy workloads into the cloud

2022 has been a busy year for the Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes team. Not only have we delivered five feature-packed releases to our customers, but we have observed 10x growth in the number of VMs running on top of Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes, proving yet again that OpenStack is still a relevant, and important framework for virtualization workloads for enterprises and service providers.

In the previous MOSK release, we encouraged users to preview our next LTS (long-term support) OpenStack - Yoga. Now just a short time later, we have received valuable feedback which helped us to refine it and we are happy to announce that OpenStack Yoga is now full available for all the MOSK customers and will be supported for 2 years. For existing deployments running OpenStack Victoria there is a simple upgrade path available, thanks to MOSK’s superb life-cycle management. 

OpenStack Yoga provides a number of interesting features and improvements. You can continue working with OpenStack Victoria-based software if desired, but we recommend planning for migration to the latest available version as soon as possible.

Cloud-ready applications utilize S3-compatible object storage to reliably store large amounts of data and share it with others, if necessary. However, it is typical for the enterprise applications developed in the old days to exchange data using extensive file shares hosted on Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances. To help our users onboard such workloads to the cloud without rewriting them, MOSK 22.5 introduces Shared Filesystems-aaS based on OpenStack Manila. The API it provides allows cloud users to dynamically provision file shares and mount them to OpenStack VMs using common protocols, such as NFS or CIFS/SMB. The technical preview of the Shared Filesystems service comes with a default backend (generic driver) which might not be good enough for production but allows to evaluate its functionality with a standard Open vSwitch-based MOSK cloud that does not have any external storage appliances attached.

OpenStack services can be configured to emit notification messages when a virtual resource (VM, volume, router, etc) gets created, deleted or changes its state. The messages can be used for various purposes such as security auditing, cloud monitoring, or collecting data about resource consumption. Starting with MOSK 22.5, you can securely expose a part of your cluster’s message bus, so that external systems can subscribe to notifications and consume them in parallel. This can become useful if you are looking to integrate MOSK with a 3rd party billing system, for instance, Cloud7 by our partner iVolve.

It is not uncommon for modern data centers to build their network infrastructure completely around layer 3 packet routing, and to consider layer 2 network stretching as a legacy burden. Such data center architectures, for example “spine-leaf”, are designed to satisfy the high demands modern applications have for network scaling, resiliency, and performance. The latest versions of Mirantis Container Cloud and MOSK make it even easier to integrate OpenStack clouds into L3-only networking, by enabling the BGP mode for MOSK’s underlying Kubernetes load-balancer (MetalLB). So that the servers that run component of OpenStack control plane can be distributed across multiple independent racks, that have just a few or zero (depending on the cloud networking backend) L2 segments in common. Previously, it was only possible for hypervisors and servers hosting cloud storage. 

If you’re ready to learn how MOSK can help you virtualize your infrastructure, why not give it a spin for free? The TryMOSK environment is a ready-to-use OpenStack cloud hosted on Equinix Metal. This small, but full-featured MOSK lets you deploy a few production grade applications so that you can experience the all benefits that it would provide to your business. Sign up for your free trial, today!.

To learn more about new features in Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes 22.5, check out the release notes.  You can also learn more about MOSK on our website at http://www.mirantis.com/mosk