Mirantis

Profile

Mirantis is an enterprise cloud-native infrastructure company providing comprehensive Kubernetes-based solutions for managing containerized, virtualized, and AI workloads across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Founded in 1999 and recognized as a Foundational NVIDIA AI Cloud ISV Partner, the company serves major enterprises including Adobe, DocuSign, PayPal, and Societe Generale. Mirantis delivers an integrated stack spanning container runtimes, Kubernetes management platforms, OpenStack virtualization, and AI infrastructure orchestration. The company maintains strong open-source commitments through projects like k0s, k0rdent, and k0smotron while offering enterprise-grade support, security validation, and compliance certifications. Mirantis enables organizations to achieve infrastructure control and automation without vendor lock-in, supporting deployments from bare metal through public clouds and edge environments.

Focus

Mirantis addresses the complexity of managing Kubernetes clusters, containers, and AI workloads at enterprise scale across heterogeneous infrastructure. The platform solves challenges including multi-cluster lifecycle management, GPU resource orchestration for AI applications, unified control of virtual machines and containers, and secure container image management. Platform engineering teams benefit from declarative automation, GitOps workflows, and composable service catalogs that reduce operational overhead while maintaining infrastructure flexibility. The company targets enterprises requiring production-grade Kubernetes with stringent security, compliance, and data sovereignty requirements, particularly in regulated industries. Mirantis enables organizations to modernize infrastructure incrementally without forced migrations, supporting both traditional containerized applications and emerging AI workloads through integrated observability, policy enforcement, and cost optimization capabilities.

Background

Mirantis was established in 1999 by Alex Freedland and Boris Renski, initially focusing on OpenStack cloud infrastructure as a founding member of the OpenStack Foundation. The company's strategic direction shifted significantly following its November 2019 acquisition of Docker Enterprise, bringing enterprise container platform capabilities and hundreds of Fortune 100 customers under Mirantis stewardship. This acquisition accelerated the company's transformation toward Kubernetes-centric infrastructure management. Mirantis maintains active contributions to Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects and operates as a privately held organization with leadership from co-founder Alex Freedland, who returned as CEO in January 2024. The company demonstrates continuous product development through regular releases and maintains extensive open-source commitments alongside commercial enterprise offerings, serving organizations requiring production-grade infrastructure management.

Main features

Enterprise Kubernetes management with unified multi-cluster control

Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (MKE) and k0rdent Enterprise provide centralized lifecycle management for Kubernetes clusters across on-premises, public cloud, and edge infrastructure. The platforms deliver declarative automation through GitOps workflows, enabling platform engineers to provision, configure, and upgrade clusters consistently across AWS, Azure, GCP, OpenStack, vSphere, and bare metal. MKE incorporates comprehensive REST APIs secured with role-based access control, supporting programmatic cluster management and integration with existing enterprise systems. k0rdent Enterprise functions as a Kubernetes-native control plane managing multiple downstream clusters, providing drift correction, built-in observability, and composable service catalogs. Organizations benefit from reduced operational complexity through unified policy enforcement and centralized monitoring across distributed infrastructure.

Production-hardened container runtime with enterprise security

Mirantis Container Runtime (MCR) delivers an enterprise-grade container runtime built on the CNCF Docker Moby project with enhanced security, compliance, and operational capabilities. The runtime implements FIPS-validated cryptography, image signing and content trust for supply chain security, and the Container Runtime Interface through cri-dockerd for Kubernetes compatibility. MCR supports containerd image store with native multi-platform images, WebAssembly containers, and pluggable snapshotters for advanced capabilities including lazy pulling and performance optimizations. The runtime maintains compatibility with Docker-based development workflows while providing tested releases across diverse operating systems including RHEL, SLES, and Ubuntu. Organizations gain production stability through regular maintenance releases addressing security vulnerabilities and defects.

AI infrastructure orchestration from bare metal to model deployment

k0rdent AI provides comprehensive Metal-to-Model infrastructure automation for deploying AI workloads at scale across GPU-optimized environments. The platform automates bare metal provisioning, Kubernetes cluster lifecycle management, GPU-aware scheduling, and multi-tenant isolation with billing-grade metering for accurate resource tracking. Platform engineers benefit from pre-built templates for training and inference services, integrated observability dashboards, and cost tracking capabilities tailored to AI workload requirements. The architecture addresses specialized needs including NVIDIA CUDA integration, RDMA networking, high-performance storage coordination, and GPU resource allocation across NVIDIA Blackwell and Hopper architectures. Organizations deploying AI infrastructure gain reduced time-to-value through automated coordination of complex infrastructure operations while maintaining security and compliance controls.