Mesosphere and Google Team Up on Containers and Clusters

Recently, I covered the news that Google had released Kubernetes under an open-source license, which is essentially a version of Borg, used to harness computing power from data centers into a powerful virtual machine. It can make a difference for many cloud computing deployments, and optimizes usage of container technology. You can find the source code for Kubernetes on GitHub.

Now, Google and startup Mesosphere have announced the integration of Google's Kubernetes container cluster manager into the Mesosphere platform to streamline the deployment of Docker workloads. It's part of a far reaching partnership to ease deployment of applications in the cloud.

Mesosphere co-founder and CEO Florian Leibert said in a blog post that Mesosphere focuses on enabling users to manage their datacenters or clouds as if they were one large machine:

"Mesosphere creates a single, highly-elastic pool of resources from which all applications can draw, creating sophisticated clusters out of raw compute nodes (whether physical machines or virtual machines). These Mesosphere clusters are highly available and support scheduling of diverse workloads on the same cluster, such as those from Marathon, Chronos, Hadoop, and Spark. Mesosphere is based on the open source Apache Mesos distributed systems kernel used by customers like Twitter, Airbnb, and Hubspot to power internet scale applications. Mesosphere makes it possible to develop and deploy applications faster with less friction, operate them at massive scale with lower overhead, and enjoy higher levels of resiliency and resource efficiency with no code changes."

"We’re collaborating with Google to bring together Mesosphere, Kubernetes and Google Cloud Platform to make it even easier for our customers to run applications and containers at scale. Today, we are excited to announce that we’re bringing Mesosphere to the Google Cloud Platform with a web app that enables customers to deploy Mesosphere clusters in minutes. In addition, we are also incorporating Kubernetes into Mesos to manage the deployment of Docker workloads. Together, we provide customers with a commercial-grade, highly-available and production-ready compute fabric."

Mesosphere for Google Cloud Platform is available here. With it, developers can create a Mesosphere cluster on Cloud Platform using either standard or custom configurations. "The app automatically installs and configures everything you need to run a Mesosphere cluster, including the Mesos kernel, Zookeeper and Marathon, as well as OpenVPN so you can log into your cluster," the announcement notes.

Eventually, this functionality will be incorporated directly into the Google Cloud Platform dashboard via the click-to-deploy feature. 

What are the costs involved in running Mesosphere for Google Cloud Platform? There is no cost beyond the charges for running configured instances on an existing Google Cloud Platform account. To get started with Mesosphere's tools, you can login with your Google credentials and launch a Mesos cluster.