Mirantis looks to open up OpenStack vendor certifications

Mirantis, a services and systems integration company that has evolved into an OpenStack distribution provider, may be small in size but the company has proven time and again that it isn’t afraid to mix things up with the big boys in the cloud playground in which it plays. And now it’s going up against Red Hat in an effort to push an open-source certification initiative for products within OpenStack cloud environments.

In recent years, the company has had its fair share of controversy.  At one time, the company came out against VMware’s participation in the OpenStack community and publicly expressed concern and skepticism about VMware’s joining the foundation.  Later down the road, the company again went after VMware, this time throwing out the claim (which it later walked back) that PayPal was ditching the virtualization giant in favor of migrating to OpenStack.  Even more recently, Mirantis ignited a Twitter storm after blogging that the addition of higher-level services to OpenStack would kill off third-party PaaS implementations.

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Fast forward, and the company is once again making bold statements — and putting its words into action.  According to David Fishman, vice president of marketing at Mirantis, large companies have historically used certifications to build artificial competitive barriers against smaller, disruptive vendors.  As a result, he claims these smaller companies, who may have superior technologies, could find that they’re not “certified” to run on the products of larger vendors.  

Instead of relying on vendor-specific certifications, Mirantis is leading the charge for an open-source certification initiative for third-party hardware and software integrations within OpenStack cloud environments.  On the surface, this sounds completely logical and necessary — and perhaps it is. But it’s still not without controversy.

Fishman went on to describe this new initiative:

We’re already seeing these kind of “closed-door open source” plays happen in OpenStack; the goal of this initiative is to level the playing field.  The objective is to provide the OpenStack community with a standard and open set of tools that vendors can use to self-certify the compatibility of their solutions with the upstream OpenStack codebase.  Any vendors can set up their own internal testing labs, link those labs to the community-driven OpenStack continuous integration system, and dynamically expose the results of their certification tests in a publicly available dashboard.

With the initiative there will be a free, open source of information available to customers detailing how the products of OpenStack vendors — Mirantis included — integrate with the wider OpenStack codebase.  Customers win because they get the facts to judge the performance of all OpenStack offerings against a common yardstick, without the obstruction of product certifications.

Fishman went on to say that products should be judged solely on their own merits and should be totally interoperable with one another.  He added that, “if a customer wants to use one vendor’s OS and another’s hypervisor and a third’s storage back end, they should be able to do so.  In that way, the open certification initiative represents a step towards that goal by allowing customers complete visibility over how every vendor’s product integrates with the upstream OpenStack codebase.”

As an example, if an IT organization has an existing storage device from EMC, Hitachi, or NetApp and wants it managed via OpenStack, it will now have a place to go to see if that particular storage product will work with a specific version of OpenStack.

Mirantis isn’t going at this initiative alone.  The company said more than a dozen major infrastructure vendors, including HP, NetApp, and VMware, as well as large OpenStack users such as AT&T and Yahoo, are supporting the initiative.  Mirantis also stated that it will be asking all of its partners that integrate with Mirantis OpenStack to formally join this effort as well.  It hopes other providers will do the same. 

While the list of companies signing up for this multi-vendor open source certification initiative is respectable, there is at least one name noticeably missing from the list: Red Hat.  Red Hat is OpenStack’s top contributor, according to Stackalytics, representing 20 percent of all code commits on the Havana release, compared to Mirantis which comes in fifth place with 9 percent of commits.

So where is the Linux giant in all of this?  Well, much like its Linux certifications, Red Hat appears to be championing its own vendor certification process, which is part of the company’s value add to its users.  In fact, as you might expect, around the same time as the Mirantis announcement, Red Hat put out its own announcement on the topic, stating:

A key aspect of the inherent value proposition that Red Hat brings to the table is our co-investment with partners in making sure that our products work together as expected, and are supported in a collaborative and well understood manner to reduce customer complexity.  This technology certification is an important element that has helped build Red Hat into one of the world’s most trusted brands.

So Mirantis and Red Hat are pushing two very different OpenStack certification processes. 

How many certification programs does one open source cloud infrastructure project really need?  And shouldn’t OpenStack already have a community certification process in place?

In fact, last November at the OpenStack Summit event in Hong Kong, the OpenStack Foundation formed a new committee called DefCore to better define OpenStack Core.  One of the outcomes from that committee was to create RefStack, a way of collecting and comparing test results that support the core definition process.  The RefStack effort would help define API-level tests for specific OpenStack implementations that when passed would allow the OpenStack label to be used.

Of course, that seems different from what Mirantis is proposing.  Mirantis is instead focusing on drivers and plug-ins from third-party vendors to ensure compatibility with different distributions of OpenStack.

According to Rob Hirschfeld, OpenStack board member and co-chair of the DefCore committee, the work that Mirantis is doing is being coordinated with the DefCore activity, and it does align with the direction of the board. Although these efforts are filling a gap, Hirschfeld did confirm that Mirantis may be jumping ahead a little — and that is the spirit of the community.

“There are a lot of places where we need to implement test coverage to support DefCore,” Hirschfeld said. “This effort is just the beginning, and there is a need for community activity to expand coverage and run tests, and also share interoperability information.”

To help kick start this effort, Mirantis said that it is offering free support to vendors setting up their internal testing labs.  The company’s support experts will be on hand to provide a combination of developer and administrator skills and experience in data center environments to help vendors identify, troubleshoot, resolve, and restore any testing issues in a timely fashion. 

Will an open certification program like the one being driven by Mirantis work?  Or will consumers of OpenStack instead be drawn to a vendor-specific certification program from someone like Red Hat, who as of late has been the clear leader in code contribution to the OpenStack project?

If you’re an OpenStack shop, does this open-vendor certification process interest you?  And will you take advantage of it to certify your environment? 

If nothing else, a certification test like this from Mirantis shows what solutions work with what versions of OpenStack, which should make things a lot easier with new deployments or future software upgrades.

This article, “Mirantis looks to open up OpenStack vendor certifications,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.