News

Mesosphere Embraces Big Data for 'Container 2.0' Era

• By David Ramel
• August 1, 2016

Mesosphere today announced several partnerships with Big Data vendors to bring their wares to its open source DC/OS distributed operating system and advance the possibilities of container technology in the new era of "Container 2.0."

Based on the Apache Mesos distributed systems kernel, Mesosphere's DC/OS is described by the company as the easiest way to run Big Data and related technologies, such as Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra, microservices and containers. It was open sourced by the company in April.

Specifically, Mesosphere's description of DC/OS reads: "It enables the management of multiple machines as if they were a single computer. It automates resource management, schedules process placement, facilitates inter-process communication, and simplifies the installation and management of distributed services. Its included Web interface and available command-line interface (CLI) facilitate remote management and monitoring of the cluster and its services."

Today, the company announced agreements with Confluent, DataStax and Lightbend, which are all bringing their Big Data technologies to the DC/OS platform. Mesosphere framed the agreements within the larger context of advancing what's possible in the world of container technology, heading toward its vision of "Container 2.0."

"At its simplest, Container 2.0 is the ability to run (and orchestrate) both stateless and stateful services on the same set of resources," Mesosphere exec Florian Leibert said in a blog post today. "This is how modern applications should be built and operated if we want to use them to their full potential for curing diseases, solving business problems or delivering the next great consumer experience. If we can't finally -- and completely -- knock down the siloes between applications and infrastructure, then the core components of modern applications -- efficient code deployment on containers and powerful data processing and analytics -- will only be as good as the networks between them."

That "powerful data processing and analytics" functionality is coming to DC/OS via the new partnerships.

The high-throughput distributed messaging system, Kafka, comes from the Confluent Platform, used for streaming data. "Built for scale and reliability, it solves the very real problem of running of building and running real time data applications," said fellow Mesosphere exec Keith Chambers in his own blog post today.

The large-scale distributed database, Cassandra, comes with DataStax Enterprise (DSE). Chambers said it "builds on Apache Cassandra to enable developers to build innovative real time Web, mobile and Internet of Things [IoT] applications with unprecedented performance, scale and availability."

Developers can now install those two Big Data offerings on DC/OS with a single click in the DC/OS Universe package repository, said Chambers, who also noted the inclusion of Spark, the popular data processing framework that's shaking up the Hadoop ecosystem, with the Lightbend partnership.

"Today, we also expanded our support partnership with Lightbend around its Reactive Platform and Apache Spark, the data-processing and analytics power of which are a major part of modern, data-driven enterprise applications," Chambers said. "In fact, Spark, Cassandra and Kafka are a common and powerful collection for real-time data pipelines. Commercial subscriptions for Confluent Platform, DataStax Enterprise and Lightbend Reactive Platform, as well as Enterprise DC/OS, are available from their respective companies."

Along with the new Confluent, DataStax and Lightbend offerings available on DC/OS Universe, other technologies provided include Jenkins, Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), DataDog and many others.

"The support of partners like these -- and the successes we've already had with them -- is proof that the world is heading toward Container 2.0, and that DC/OS is already there," Leibert said. "Innovative companies are well down the road toward modern containerized and data-driven applications, and now they're looking for the right software to brings those apps from the lab and into production. They know the power of Mesos, Cassandra, Kafka and Spark, and now they're taking it to the next level with Mesosphere, DataStax, Confluent and Lightbend."