Mesosphere Aligns with Intel on "Cloud for All" Push

Intel may not be the first company you think of when you think of cloud computing, but this week the company has thrown its hat in the cloud ring in a big way. Earlier, I covered its collaboration with Rackspace on a far reaching OpenStack Innovation Center. And, the company has announced its "Cloud for All" initiative to bring the benefits of the cloud to more businesses.

Among the obsevers reacting to Intel's announcements is Mesosphere, which remains focused on its Datacenter Operating System (DCOS). The company is participating in the Cloud Native Foundation overseen by The Linux Foundation, and is a strategic partner with Intel on its new cloud programs.

 According to a Mesosphere post featuring an interview with Intel Principal Engineer Das Kamhout:

"Historically, enterprises have had a hard time even getting to the point of self-service and automation around technologies like virtual machines — and they have been around for a long time. So we see a lot of barriers that we really need to tackle as an industry to bring cloud computing and hyper-scale to the masses.

One of the barriers comes down to high availability of tenants in a shared environment, meaning how to make sure the users’ infrastructure is always on. While some enterprises have shifted their application models to assume failure and have switched to microservices and containers, the huge portion of applications and infrastructure today are very much expected to always be on.

When companies have moved to cloud-native architectures, another key challenge becomes high availability of the cloud services themselves. If enterprises are building automation around APIs, we have to make sure those services are always on so the applications that connect and rely on them don’t suffer.

On the scaling side, we see a pretty wide spectrum. Although most OpenStack clouds today have not gone past a couple hundred nodes, Intel is driving to make it easy to scale to 1,000 nodes or more as those environments mature."

 According to Intel:

"Consumer services from major cloud service providers have driven the first wave of cloud adoption, accounting for 75 percent of current cloud usage. However, over the next five years, opportunities created from the Internet of Things and big data analytics solutions will be leading drivers for enterprise cloud growth. According to industry research firm IDC, organizations will spend an additional $142.8 billion on infrastructure for both public and private cloud environments in the next three years (2016-2018) to boost efficiency and business agility."

The Intel Cloud for All initiative will focus on three primary areas to accelerate new cloud deployments and help businesses get the most from their cloud infrastructure:

- Investing in the ecosystem to accelerate enterprise-ready, easy-to-deploy software defined infrastructure (SDI) solutions;

- Optimizing SDI solutions to deliver highly efficient clouds across a range of workloads by taking full advantage of Intel platform capabilities; and

- Aligning the industry and engaging the community through open industry standards, solutions and routes to market to accelerate cloud deployment.