News

Mesosphere Aims SDK at Distributed Apps

• By David Ramel
• July 15, 2015

Cloud computing startup Mesosphere Inc. today announced an upcoming software development kit (SDK) for building distributed applications to run on the company's Datacenter Operating System (DCOS).

The DCOS is based on the open source Apache Mesos project, which treats an entire datacenter's infrastructure as just another form factor, going a step beyond the traditional mobile device, laptop and server paradigm. It pools together all available resources, including memory, CPU and storage, from multiple distributed servers -- whether physical, virtual or cloud-based -- to deploy and manage apps or workloads of all types, with an emphasis on container technologies such as Docker.

Mesosphere said the DCOS provides the following functionality:

• Application scheduling and scaling.
• Application fault-tolerance and self-healing.
• Under load application prioritization of applications.
• Application service port unification.
• Application service discovery.
• Application service end-point elasticity.

DCOS supports many services, integrating with distributed systems used in Big Data analytics such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, along with NoSQL (or NewSQL) databases like Cassandra and MemSQL and orchestration tools like Mesophere's own Marathon or Kubernetes, running cloud-native applications.

Having publicized those services available to developers since the product's launch last December, Mesosphere is introducing an SDK and a developer program to help take advantage of them, company exec Derrick Harris said in a blog post today.

"We've been talking about all the services we support, datacenter services that you can install in your datacenter or cloud environment almost as easily as you install an app on your laptop or smartphone," Harris said. "Need a file system? Install [Hadoop Distributed File System] HDFS. Need a messaging system? Try Kafka. Need a database? Give Cassandra a go.

"The developer program and SDK provide tools -- documentation, reference libraries and support -- will make it simple to develop all types of distributed services or applications on top of the DCOS," Harris continued. "The operative words here are 'simple' and 'distributed.' Because it's built with Apache Mesos at its core, the DCOS takes care of common distributed computing headaches such as job scheduling, high availability, resource isolation and networking -- meaning developers don't have to."

With the SDK, developers can use Java, Scala, Python, Go and C++ to create any kind of application that can benefit from running in an automated, distributed system, the company said.

The kit includes technical guides for development and design, project templates to quickly bootstrap projects and code examples that can be used to create programs that -- even though designed to run in a distributed environment -- can be run right from a developer's local machine.

Developer support is provided through Google Groups or the Slack Channel, which lets coders chat live with DCOS experts and developers. Enhanced support is available through a VIP Partner program. That program also lets developers submit their app designs for review by Mesosphere experts prior to embarking on a full-fledged development project.

Mesosphere is inviting interested developers to sign up for early access to the developer program, which is expected to become publicly available later this year. The Mesosphere DCOS comes in a free community edition available on the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud and in an enterprise edition with more features and support. A free 30-day trial is also available.