"We've been hard at work building our MidoNet solution for the past four years, well ahead of the competition," said Dan Mihai Dumitriu, co-founder and CEO of Midokura. "The OpenStack Neutron community is quite fractured because multiple vendors are trying to sell proprietary solutions and thus have little incentive to invest in the default, which remains unfit for production. We decided to resolve the cognitive dissonance by open sourcing MidoNet, and making it a truly community driven project. We are giving the OpenStack community a stable, scalable, easy to deploy and fully open virtual networking solution."
With today's announcement, all of the code behind MidoNet is now available under the Apache 2.0 license, letting anyone in the popular and rapidly growing OpenStack community use, distribute and build on the technology, as well as submit back to the project. Midokura is committed to building a non-vendor driven community around the project and has dedicated resources to building and supporting a community of MidoNet users, including new staffing, a website and community infrastructure.
"Many prospective users and early adopters of OpenStack have been challenged by the complexity and difficulty of its Neutron networking technologies," said Brad Casemore, Research Director, Data Center Networks at IDC. "OpenStack's networking initiatives generally have been fragmented and have lagged behind other major projects within OpenStack. By open sourcing MidoNet, Midokura is seeking to provide a solution that adheres to the open-source, community-based ethos of OpenStack while also looking to deliver a coherent and cohesive approach to solving the full-stack network challenges that OpenStack presents."
Top-Tier Companies Support the Open Source Network Virtualization Project
More than 18 top-tier partners are standing behind Midokura to support the open source project, many already working to integrate MidoNet with industry-leading cloud platforms and technologies. These companies include 8x8, Bit-isle, Broadcom, Cumulus Networks, Eucalyptus Systems, Fujtisu, iDCF, KVH, Mellanox Technologies, Mirantis, NIMBOXX, Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT), Red Hat, Solinea, Stratoscale, SUSE and Zetta.io.
Canonical has also joined as a founding member of the MidoNet community, and is working closely with Midokura to bring MidoNet into the Ubuntu OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL), which will provide advanced integration testing to MidoNet with OpenStack and the ecosystem around it. As more companies join the community, the MidoNet ecosystem will naturally extend the platform's reach and core technology capabilities.