Denver, US, April 29, 2019 — Mirantis announces a new SaaS service at the Open Infrastructure Summit in Denver. The company promises that the service, known as Model Designer, would enable businesses using the Mirantis Cloud Platform (MCP) to build and deploy their own clouds on the premises.
What is MCP?
Mirantis is one of the key vendors of the OpenStack service. The MCP is based on OpenStack and Kubernetes and helps the users run optimized on-premises clouds powered by IaC. These clouds are open-source and make it easier for an organization to manage its infrastructure via the machine-readable files, instead of physical configuration. IaC allows for managing both physical data centers and virtual machines. As a result, the organization gets the flexibility and the service required to meet its KPIs. Below the article is a video explaining how the MCP works to achieve that goal.
How Does Model Designer Work?
The Model Designer, to be available from this month onwards, allows the users to customize their on-premises clouds and to deploy them quickly. Rather than writing out complex YAML files by hand, which was how MCP’s configuration functioned until now, the user would be presented with a graphical user interface, providing visual aids for configuration. The configuration steps come with the “fun” difficulty levels, starting with “I am too young to die.” The user chooses the measures that reflect the extent to which they want to customize, and Model Designer does the customization for them, with zero complex YAML involved. After all, “a guy in a <telephone company> is not likely dealing with YAML files. He wants an interface”. And Model Designer makes that possible.
So, in essence, the Model Designer’s added value is speed and risk reduction. Writing out YAML files had had a high risk of errors and frustration. Not to mention, manual coding of the sort takes up a lot of user’s time they’d rather be spending on working on their product.
The increased automation and customization provided by the new SaaS aim to combat that. Indeed, as described by the co-founder and CMO of Mirantis Boris Renski, Model Designer “provides the necessary guardrails, making it easier for anyone to get started with MCP, without compromising on the flexibility they may require down the road as they expand their cloud footprint.”
YouTube: Mirantis Cloud Platform – Flexibility and Repeatability Don’t Have to Be Mutually Exclusive
Photo credit: The photos are owned by Unsplash.
Source: Mirantis’ Press Release, Linda Hardesty (FierceTelecom) / Frederic Lardinois (TechCrunch) / Armon Dagdar (HashiCorp)