Open source cloud computing company Mirantis promises a “quick onramp” for OpenStack through Fuel, a cloud deployment and management tool that has now become an official part of the OpenStack big tent.

Fuel provides GUI-based deployment and management features for cloud administrators who are building or maintaining environments based on OpenStack. In the words of its developers, it brings “consumer-grade simplicity to streamline and accelerate the otherwise time-consuming, often complex, and error-prone process of deploying, testing and maintaining various configuration flavors of OpenStack at scale.”

Fuel is only one of many management and automation tools for OpenStack. Products like Puppet and Chef do similar things. However, Mirantis — which led the way in Fuel development as a complement to the company’s OpenStack distributions — envisions Fuel as a singularly comprehensive deployment and management tool for the open source cloud.

Mirantis is also emphasizing Fuel’s “pure-play” codebase. Like the rest of Mirantis’s OpenStack software suite, Fuel is designed to be compatible with third-party OpenStack projects, making integration easy and assuring vendor neutrality.

As of Nov. 17, Fuel became an official OpenStack component under the project’s current “big tent” organizational policy. Mirantis says it hopes the change will entice other OpenStack vendors to contribute to Fuel development, which will focus going forward on enhancing the “day 2” functionality of the product — in other words, ongoing maintenance of an open source cloud.