Apache Software Foundation Serves Up Mesos Version 1.0

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), which incubates more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, has announced the availability of Apache Mesos v1.0. In case you missed it, Mesos and related efforts from companies such as Mesosphere have already made a mighty impact on clustering, data center resource management and emerging data center operating systems.

Mesos funcions as a container orchestrator, and a distributed operating systems kernel, and everything you need to get going with it is at  http://mesos.apache.org/ 

“At Berkeley in 2009, we were thinking about a new way to manage clusters and Big Data, and Mesos was born,” said Benjamin Hindman, Vice President of Apache Mesos, one of the original creators of the project, and Chief Architect/Co-Founder of Mesosphere. (Ben is shown in the photo above.) “Mesos v1.0 is a major milestone for the community.”

Mesos entered the Apache Incubator in 2010 and has had 36 releases since becoming a Top-Level Project (TLP) in 2013.

In a previous interview I did with Hindman, he said the following when discussing Mesos and trends in data centers:

"Operators will stop thinking in terms of individual servers, and more in terms of reasoning across pools of resources and running distributed applications. Some particularly interesting distributed applications will fall under the domain of “stateful services”, which is a challenging application to run in the cloud today and is ripe for innovation in the next few years. There will be a lot of interesting work using machine learning to better automate and manage applications as well. Humans are notoriously bad at figuring out how many resources they need and will ultimately be completely handled via software."

 One of Mesos’ earliest and most notable users was Twitter, who leveraged the Mesos architecture to kill the “Fail Whale” by handling its massive growth in site traffic. Prominent Mesos contributors and users include IBM, Mesosphere, Netflix, PayPal, Yelp, and many more.

“Initially the big breakthrough was this new way to run containers at scale, but the beauty of the design of Mesos and its two-level scheduler has proven to be its ability to run not only containers, but Big Data frameworks, storage services, and other applications all on the same cluster,” added Hindman. “Mesos has become a core technology that serves as a kernel for other systems to be built on top, so the maturity on the API has been a big focus, and it’s one of the main areas of improvement in the 1.0 release.”