>> Hi, I'm Adrienne Davis, Customer Success Manager on the CFO-side of the house at Mirantis. With me today is Artem Andreev, Product Manager and expert, who's going to enlighten us today. >> Hello everyone. It's great to hear all of you listening to our discussion today. So my name is Artem Andreev. I'm a Product Manager for Mirantis OpenStack line of products. That includes the current product line that we have in the the next generation product line that we're about to launch quite soon. And actually this is going to be the topic of our presentation today. So the new product that we are very, very, very excited about, and that is going to be launched in a matter of several weeks, is called Mirantis OpenStack on Kubernetes. For those of you who have been in Mirantis quite a while already, Mirantis OpenStack on Kubernetes is essentially a reincarnation of our Miranti Cloud Platform version one, as we call it these days. So, and the theme has reincarnated into something more advanced, more robust, and altogether modern, that provides the same, if not more, value to our customers, but packaged in a different shape. And well, we're very excited about this new launch, and we would like to share this excitement with you Of course. As you might know, recently a few months ago, Mirantis acquired Docker Enterprise together with the advanced Kubernetes technology that Docker Enterprise provides. And we made this technology the piece and parcel of our product suite, and this naturally includes OpenStack Mirantis, OpenStack on Kubernetes as well, since this is a part of our product suite. And well, the Kubernetes technology in question, we call Docker Enterprise Container Cloud these days, I'm going to refer to this name a lot over the course of the presentation. So I would like to split today's discussions to several major parts. So for those of you who do not know what OpenStack is in general, a quick recap might be helpful to understand the value that it provides. I will discuss why someone still needs OpenStack in 2020. We will talk about what a modern OpenStack distribution is supposed to do to the expectation that is there. And of course, we will go into a bit of details of how exactly Mirantis OpenStack on Kubernetes works, how it helps to deploy and manage OpenStack clouds. >> So set the stage for me here. What's the base environment we were trying to get to? >> So what is OpenStack? One can think of OpenStack as a free and open source alternative to VMware, and it's a fair comparison. So OpenStack, just as VMware, operates primarily on Virtual Machines. So it gives you as a user, a clean and crispy interface to launch a virtual VM, to configure the virtual networking to plug this VM into it to configure and provision virtual storage, to attach to your VM, and do a lot of other things that actually a modern application requires to run. So the idea behind OpenStack is that you have a clean and crispy API exposed to you as a user, and alters little details and nuances of the physical infrastructure configuration provision that need to happen just for the virtual application to work are hidden, and spread across multiple components that comprise OpenStack per se. So as compared again, to a VMware, the functionality is pretty much similar, but actually OpenStack can do much more than just Vms, and it does that, at frankly speaking much less price, if we do the comparison. So what OpenStack has to offer. Naturally, the virtualization, networking, storage systems out there, it's just the basic entry level functionality. But of course, what comes with it is the identity and access management features, or practical user interface together with the CLI and command line tools to manage the cloud, orchestration functionality, to deploy your application in the form of templates, ability to manage bare metal machines, and of course, some nice and fancy extras like DNSaaS service, Metering, Secret Management, and Load Balancing. And frankly speaking, OpenStack can actually do even more, depending on the needs that you have. >> We hear so much about containers today. Do applications even need VMs anymore? Can't Kubernetes provide all these services? And even if IaaS is still needed, why would one bother with building their own private platform, if there's a wide choice of public solutions for virtualization, like Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure, and Google cloud platform? >> Well, that's a very fair question. And you're absolutely correct. So the whole trend (audio blurs) as the States. Everybody's talking about containers, everybody's doing containers, but to be realistic, yes, the market still needs VMs. There are certain use cases in the modern world. And actually these use cases are quite new, like 5G, where you require high performance in the networking for example. You might need high performance computing as well. So when this takes quite special hardware and configuration to be provided within your infrastructure, that is much more easily solved with the Vms, and not containers. Of course not to mention that, there are still legacy applications that you need to deal with, and that well, they have just switched from the server-based provision into VM-based provision, and they need to run somewhere. So they're not just ready for containers. And well, if we think about, okay, VMs are still needed, but why don't I just go to a public infrastructure as a service provider and run my workloads there? Now if you can do that, but well, you have to be prepared to pay a lot of money, once you start running your workloads at scale. So public IaaSes, they actually tend to hit your pockets heavily. And of course, if you're working in a highly regulated area, like enterprises cover (audio blurs) et cetera, so you have to comply with a lot of security regulations and data placement regulations. And well, public IaaSes, let's be frank, they're not good at providing you with this transparency. So you need to have full control over your whole stack, starting from the hardware to the very, very top. And this is why private infrastructure as a service is still a theme these days. And I believe that it's going to be a theme for at least five years more, if not more. >> So if private IaaSes are useful and demanded, why does Mirantis just stick to the OpenStack that we already have? Why did we decide to build a new product, rather than keep selling the current one? >> Well, to answer this question, first, we need to see what actually our customers believe more in infrastructure as a service platform should be able to provide. And we've compiled this list into like five criteria. Naturally, private IaaS needs to be reliable and robust, meaning that whatever happens on the underneath the API, that should not be impacting the business generated workloads, this is a must, or impacting them as little as possible, the platform needs to be secure and transparent, going back to the idea of working in the highly regulated areas. And this is again, a table stake to enter the enterprise market. The platform needs to be simple to deploy (audio blurs) 'cause well, you as an operator, you should not be thinking about the internals, but try to focus in on enabling your users with the best possible experience. Updates, updates are very important. So the platform needs to keep up with the latest software patches, bug fixes, and of course, features, and upgrading to a new version must not take weeks or months, and has as little impact on the running workloads as possible. And of course, to be able to run modern application, the platform needs to provide the comparable set of services, just as a public cloud so that you can move your application across your terms in the private or public cloud without having to change it severally, so-called the feature parity, it needs to be there. And if we look at the architecture of OpenStack, and we know OpenStack is powerful, it can do a lot. We've just discussed that, right? But the architecture of OpenStack is known to be complex. And well, tell me, how would you enable the robustness and robustness and reliability in this complex system? It's not easy, right? So, and actually this diagrams shelves, just like probably a third part of the modern update OpenStack cloud. So it's just a little illustration. It's not the whole picture. So imagine how hard it is to make a very solid platform out of this architecture. And well, naturally this also imposes some challenges to provide the transparency and security, 'cause well, the more complex the system is, the harder it is to manage, and well the harder it is to see what's on the inside, and well upgrades, yeah. One of the biggest challenges that we learned from our past previous history, well that many of our customers prefer to stay on the older version of OpenStack, just because, well, they were afraid of upgraded, cause they saw upgrades as time-consuming and risky and divorce. And well, instead of just switching to the latest and greatest software, they preferred reliability by sticking to the old stuff. Well, why? Well, 'cause potentially that meant implied certain impact on their workloads and well an upgrade required thorough planning and execution, just to be as as riskless as possible. And we are solving all of these challenges, of managing a system as complex as OpenStack is with Kubernetes. >> So how does Kubernetes solve these problems? >> Well, we look at OpenStack as a typical microservice architecture application, that is organized into multiple little moving parts, demons that are connected to each other and that talk to each other through the standard API. And altogether, that feels as very good feet to run on top of a Kubernetes cluster, because many of the modern applications, they fall exactly on the same pattern. >> How exactly did you put OpenStack on Kubernetes? >> Well, that's not easy. I'm going to be frank with you. And if you look at the architectural diagram, so this is a stack of Miranda's products represented with a focus of course, on the Mirantis OpenStack, as a central part. So what you see in the middle shelving pink, is Mirantis OpenStack on Kubernetes itself. And of course around that are supporting components that are needed to be there, to run OpenStack on Kubernetes successfully. So on the very bottom, there is hardware, networking, storage, computing, hardware that somebody needs to configure provision and manage, to be able to deploy the operating system on top of it. And this is just another layer of complexity that abstracts the Mirantis OpenStack on Kubernetes just from the under lake. So once we have operating system there, there needs to be a Kubernetes cluster, deployed and managed. And as I mentioned previously, we are using the capabilities that this Kuberenetes cluster provides to run OpenStack itself, the control plane that way, because everything in Mirantis OpenStack on Kuberentes is a container, or whatever you can think of. Of course naturally, it doesn't sound like an easy task to manage this multi-layered pie. And this is where Docker Enterprise Container Cloud comes into play, 'cause this is our single pane of glass into day one and day two operations for the hardware itself, for the operating system, and for Docker Enterprise Kubernetes. So it solves the need to have this underlay ready and prepared. And once the underlay is there, you go ahead, and deploy Mirantis OpenStack on Kubernetes, just as another Kubernetes application, application following the same practices and tools as you use with any other applications. So naturally of course, once you have OpenStack up and running, you can use it to create your own... To give your users ability to create their own private little Kubernetes clusters inside OpenStack projects. And this is one of the measure just cases for OpenStack these days, again, being an underlay for containers. So if you look at the operator experience, how does it look like for a human operator who is responsible for deployment the management of the cloud to deal with Mirantis OpenStack on Kubernetes? So first, you deploy Docker Enterprise Container Cloud, and you use the built-in capabilities that it provides to provision your physical infrastructure, that you discover the hardware nodes, you deploy operating system there, you do configuration of the network interfaces in storage devices there, and then you deploy Kubernetes cluster on top of that. This Kubernetes cluster is going to be dedicated to Mirantis OpenStack on Kuberenetes itself. So it's a special (indistinct) general purpose thing, that well is dedicated to OpenStack. And that means that inside of this cluster, there are a bunch of life cycle management modules, running as Kubernetes operators. So OpenStack itself has its own LCM module or operator. There is a dedicated operator for Ceph, cause Ceph is our major storage solution these days, that we integrate with. Naturally, there is a dedicated lifecycle management module for Stack Light. Stack Light is our operator, logging monitoring alerting solution for OpenStack on Kubernetes, that we bundle toegether with the whole product suite. So Kubernetes operators, directly through, it keeps the TL command or through the practical records that are provided by Docker Enterprise Container Cloud, as a part of it, to deploy the OpenStack staff and Stack Light clusters one by one, and connect them together. So instead of dealing with hundreds of YAML files, while it's five definitions, five specifications, that you're supposed to provide these days and that's safe. And although data management is performed through these APIs, just as the deployment as easily. >> All of this assumes that OpenStack has containers. Now, Mirantis was containerizing back long before Kubernetes even came along. Why did we think this would be important? >> That is true. Well, we've been containerizing OpenStack for quite a while already, it's not a new thing at all. However, is the way that we deploy OpenStack as a Kubernetes application that matters, 'cause Kubernetes solves a whole bunch of challenges that we have used to deal with, with MCP1, when deploying OpenStack on top of bare operating systems as packages. So, naturally Kubernetes provides us with... Allows us to achieve reliability through the self (audio blurs) auto-scaling mechanisms. So you define a bunch of policies that describe the behavior of OpenStack control plane. And Kubernetes follows these policies when things happen, and without actually any need for human interaction. So isolation of the dependencies or OpenStack services within Docker images is a good thing, 'cause previously we had to deal with packages and conflicts in between the versions of different libraries. So now we just ship everything together as a Docker image, and I think that early in updates is an advanced feature that Kubernetes provides natively. So updating OpenStack has never been as easy as with Kubernetes. Kubernetes also provides some fancy building blocks for network and like hold balancing, and of course, collegial tunnels, and service meshes. They're also quite helpful when dealing with such a complex application like OpenStack when things need to talk to each other and without any problem in the configuration. So Helm Reconciling is a place that also has a great deal of role. So it actually is our soul for Kubernetes. We're using Helm Bubbles, which are for opens, provide for OpenStack into upstream, as our low level layer of logic to deploy OpenStack app services and connect them to each other. And they'll naturally automatic scale-up of control plane. So adding in, YouNote is easy, you just add a new Kubernetes work up with a bunch of labels there and well, it handles the distribution of the necessary service automatically. Naturally, there are certain drawbacks. So there's fancy features come at a cost. Human operators, they need to understand Kubernetes and how it works. But this is also a good thing because everything is moving towards Kubernetes these days, so you would have to learn at some point anyway. So you can use this as a chance to bring yourself to the next level of knowledge. OpenStack is not 100% Cloud Native Application by itself. Unfortunately, there are certain components that are stateful like databases, or NOAA compute services, or open-the-switch demons, and that have to be dealt with very carefully when doing operates, updates, and all the whole deployment. So there's extra life cycle management logic build team that handles these components carefully for you. So, a bit of a complexity we had to have. And naturally, Kubernetes requires resources, and keeping the resources itself to run. So you need to have this resources available and dedicated to Kubernetes control plane, to be able to control your application, that is all OpenStack and stuff. So a bit of investment is required. >> Can anybody just containerize OpenStack services and get these benefits? >> Well, yes, the idea is not new, there's a bunch of OpStream open, sorry, community projects doing pretty much the same thing. So we are not inventing a rocket here, let's be fair. However, it's only the way that Kubernetes cooks OpenStack, gives you the robustness and reliability that enterprise and like big customers actually need. And we're doing a great deal of a job, ultimating all the possible day to work polls and all these caveats complexities of the OpenStack management inside our products. Okay, at this point, I believe we shall wrap this discussion a bit up. So let me conclude for you. So OpenStack is an opensource infrastructure as a service platform, that still has its niche in 2020th, and it's going to have it's niche for at least five years. OpenStack is a powerful but very complex tool. And the complexities of OpenStack and OpenStack life cycle management, are successfully solved by Mirantis, through the capabilities of Kubernetes distribution, that provides us with the old necessary primitives to run OpenStack, just as another containerized application these days.