Mirantis Launches FUEL, the ‘secret sauce’ behind its OpenStack Success

Largest systems integrator for OpenStack opens its own library of cloud management tools to public

Mountain View, CA, March 25, 2013 – Mirantis, the largest OpenStack systems integrator, today opened its private library of configuration and deployment tools for OpenStack to the public. The library, called FUEL, has already been used in many OpenStack projects that the company completed for customers such as PayPal, WebEx, NASA, and others.

“At PayPal, we are committed to collaborating with the open source community to drive further innovation. That’s why we are thrilled to be working with Mirantis to leverage OpenStack to help transform our global infrastructure into an agile and open cloud platform,” said Saran Mandair, Senior Director of Platform Engineering and Operations. “Our OpenStack project uses the Fuel library by Mirantis, which has dramatically accelerated our OpenStack deployment with robust, production-grade architecture while giving us the flexibility to tailor OpenStack to our needs.”

OpenStack at PayPal

Read the full story of how PayPal  leverages OpenStack for massive scalability at the OpenStack Foundation website.

“We originally developed Fuel™ for our internal services team to help accelerate OpenStack implementation projects,” explained Adrian Ionel, Mirantis CEO. “Making this library freely available for the broader OpenStack community underscores our pledge to preserve our vendor-neutral and services-forward approach in helping customers adopt OpenStack.”

FUEL consists of verified deployment scripts for implementing a variety of OpenStack deployment configurations; these range from simple configurations for PoC and dev/test scenarios to highly available configurations for production use cases.

“Companies building OpenStack clouds want to keep their infrastructure open and stay in control of its roadmap. FUEL is the ultimate do-it-yourself toolkit for OpenStack that emerged as a means to meet those exact needs,” said Boris Renski, Mirantis co-founder and OpenStack Foundation board member. “We worked with many vendors in building FUEL and specifically designed it to be completely vendor-agnostic.”

FUEL can be used to deploy third-party OpenStack distributions, such as those provided by RedHat and Canonical, and can plug into customer’s existing operations infrastructure.

“Mirantis has been very active in working with us to develop modular and robust Puppet manifests for deployment and ongoing management of OpenStack infrastructure,” said James Turnbull, vice president of Business Development at Puppet Labs.

Starting today, FUEL is freely available under Apache 2.0 license, and can be downloaded from the Mirantis Web site.  Customers can use and modify FUEL to fit their own needs and can also take advantage of an option to subscribe to a FUEL support service level agreement (SLA) provided by Mirantis.

Mirantis has been a leader in promoting and supporting the adoption of OpenStack. The company started the Bay Area OpenStack user group, offers its popular monthly  Boot Camp training  to expand the pool of skilled engineering expertise in OpenStack, and has been one of the primary evangelists for OpenStack since it began. Mirantis is venture-backed by Intel, Dell, and WestSummit Capital.