Expect Mesosphere's Open Source Data Center OS to Have a Big Impact
Everyone is still digesting the big news from Mesosphere, which is that a truly huge alliance of leading companies has joined forces with the company to unveil the beta release of DC/OS (derived from the Data Center Operating System) the first open and comprehensive platform for building, running and scaling modern enterprise applications.
DC/OS has always been built on the open source Apache Mesos project, but the platform itself is now going fully open source, and that will give it legs. As Mesosphere's Ben Hindman (shown here) told us in an interview a true Data Center Operating System can automate all kinds of tasks, creating efficiencies: "Automation enables us to be smarter about scheduling and resource allocation, helping us drive up utilization (which drives down costs) and better handle machine and hardware failures. Higher utilization is a key advantage of a datacenter operating system. If you’re in the cloud, you might be buying eight core machines but only using two cores. Your cloud provider is really the one benefiting from virtualized resources, not you! The datacenter operating system enables you to more fully utilize your machines by automating the placement of your applications across the machines."
DC/OS already offers many capabilities for container operations at scale and single-click, app-store-like installation of 20+ complex distributed systems, including HDFS, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra and more. The big news, though, is that open source community efforts will drive this platform to new heights.
"The world needed a better architecture for all modern apps, not just containers," said Florian Leibert, CEO & Co-Founder of Mesosphere. "DC/OS represents a major industry transformation, delivering today's enterprises an open source datacenter-scale operating system that pools compute resources into what looks like one big computer, running containers, microservices, big data systems and other components of modern applications with ease. The open source community has come together around DC/OS to deliver an amazing ecosystem of products and datacenter services."
More than 60 partners -- including Accenture, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Microsoft -- have had early access to DC/OS leading up to its launch and have pledged to help grow and shape the project through technology integrations and open source software contributions. Mesosphere says that DC/OS and its Universe "app store" brings single-click deployment and simplified operations for the latest generation of services designed to run in distributed environments.
"DC/OS is the inevitable next step for Apache Mesos," said Ben Hindman, who is Co-Creator of Mesos and Mesosphere Chief Architect and Co-Founder. "Organizations that run Mesos quickly discover they need all of the components we've built into DC/OS. DC/OS will democratize large-scale distributed systems and the applications they power, building on the work of the Apache Mesos kernel. By open sourcing DC/OS we're enabling organizations of all sizes to harness the same computing infrastructure as the Twitters and Apples of the world."
In our previous interview with Hindman, he added:
"A datacenter operating system enables developers, who traditionally have had to interface with humans for access to machines, to develop and run their applications directly against datacenter resources via an API. Whether they’re claiming resources for existing applications or building new frameworks, the abstraction layer of the datacenter operating system makes it easier to build applications and share those applications across organizations."
"Dealing with failures gets much easier with a datacenter operating system too. When you are running 2-3 machines dealing with failures is a pain, but you can usually track down and fix any issues within a small amount of time. But when you begin to scale to tens, then hundreds, then thousands of machines, dealing with failures becomes an expensive manual operation."