Dan's Take

Mirantis Offers Free Developer Edition of OpenStack

Dan says it's a clever play to lure developers to the open source cloud platform.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 12/08/2014

Mirantis recently launched a clever way to get developers interested in OpenStack in general and, specifically, the Mirantis distribution of OpenStack. What's the company doing? It has released a free Developer Edition of its software, Mirantis OpenStack Express, along with tutorials to help developers quickly become productive using OpenStack.

Here's what Mirantis is saying about OpenStack Express:

To support developer adoption of OpenStack, Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack company, today released a free Developer Edition of Mirantis OpenStack Express and a dozen new free OpenStack tutorials … Its Developer Edition is tailored for solo developers and solution providers looking to try OpenStack, and offers an on-demand, hosted development environment for Mirantis OpenStack, along with full 24x7 support, at no cost for the first year.

To enable OpenStack newcomers to quickly become productive with OpenStack, the Mirantis Developer Edition comes with a dozen new, online tutorials based on Mirantis Training for OpenStack. The tutorials cover common use cases such as adding images, launching VMs and using the Murano OpenStack application catalogue, all of which are available in the Developer Edition.

Dan's Take: Keeping OpenStack Independent
Mirantis is one of the few pure-play OpenStack companies left. Suppliers of hardware, software or services have grabbed up most of the other independent suppliers. Mirantis has long presented itself as the premier supplier of OpenStack technology, as well as integration services, training and support.  It's trying to lead developers to its OpenStack distribution by offering tutorials and free access to its software.

The company knows that the more developers it brings into the fold, the better it will do overall; after all, developers are likely to recommend the OpenStack distribution and integration tools that their employers or customers use. Mirantis wants to make sure that it is either at the top, or very high up on that recommendation list.

This is a clever move, and likely to spur other OpenStack distributors to follow the company's lead and offer their own tutorials and free "lab space."

If your organization is considering OpenStack as the foundation for your on- and off-premises clouds, getting to know Mirantis is a must.