Open source cloud platform OpenStack has no enemies, and all its devotees are friends with each other - but service provider Mirantis was creating most disaccord at the Open Stack summit in Paris.

Mirantis is a “pure-play” OpenStack service provider. All it does is OpenStack, and its CEO Adrian Ionel is openly critical of other service providers who pay lip service to OpenStack, wearing the T-shirt, if you will, and then sell as many proprietary add-ons and tools as they can.

The hats are off

Mirantis can afford to be critical. It’s just won $100 million of venture capital funding, and is now less dependent on deals with other vendors. It was backed by Red Hat, and provided OpenStack consulting for the Linux vendor, but the deal fell apart after Red Hat took a rival consulting partner eNovance.

Mirantis now has its own OpenStack distribution, and offers a pay-as-you-go cloud service. It has a new operating system partner, Canonical, but is very clear that operating systems and other components of the stack are all optional within its service - something it says does not apply to Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution. Red Hat’s plans to prioritise its own Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) were apparently what broke its deal with Mirantis.

“Red Hat asked us to completely lock ourselves into their operating system as a condition for honoring the agreement,” Ionel told GigaOm at the Summit.

Whatever the details, that deal is over, and Mirantis has funding to see if the world is actually ready for a pure-play OpenStack provider. If you prod other people in the space they may well tell you that OpenStack is great - but only works really well if you use this or that proprietary tool, and in many cases they may be right.

Mirantis is, accordingly, focused on the little things that make OpenStack implementations work and keep them useful. At the Summit, Ionel particularly stressed the importance of easing the transition between different versions of OpenStack.

In its short history OpenStack has got to Juno in an alphabetical series of bi-annual releases, and users have gone from experimentation to production. Now they want stability, and Mirantis’ promise in Paris is that it can smooth that upgrade path so production deployments don’t get stuck.