Mesosphere Returns to Kubernetes with a Beta for DC/OS
After pulling back from the Kubernetes project a while back, Mesosphere is offering Kubernetes in beta on its DC/OS container platform for data-intensive applications. It’s true that some clients had been running Kubernetes on DC/OS already, but this offering, announced along with the release of DC/OS 1.10, as easy to use any other services — a one-click cluster installation.
Mesosphere was one of the largest contributors to the Kubernetes project in the early days, but paused that effort due to the lack of stable APIs, according to Tobi Knaup, co-founder and CTO.
It was kind of like brain surgery, he said, to keep it in a stable enough state to offer to customers. Instead, the company focused on building out the core DC/OS and its SDK while others more fully built out Kubernetes.
Using its SDK now, it can offer a stable product — it’s unaltered upstream Kubernetes, he said.
It will support both Kubernetes and its own Marathon orchestrator, which it grafted directly into the system in DC/OS 1.8. It’s framing the move as offering customers more choice, now “bowing” to a more popular technology.
The company has stated before, its goal of allowing any or all schedulers to run unencumbered on the DC/OS platform, including Kubernetes, and to make running them more seamless.
Marathon is used for some of the largest container clusters in the world and uses a simpler operational model, Knaup said. It can also be used for legacy workloads.
Some of the world’s largest banks and telecoms are Mesosphere customers. The New Stack previously highlighted Verizon’s experiences.
Kubernetes, meanwhile, introduces some confusing concepts such ingress. Yet Kubernetes remains wildly popular, with a host of companies seeking to smooth out its operational complexities.
“We would be foolish not to pay attention to the most popular technologies,” said Peter Guagenti, chief marketing officer.
The company aims to make it as accessible on DC/OS as Spark, Cassandra, TensorFlow, Hadoop and others.
“We want to tie all those together at scale,” Knaup said. Combining Kubernetes with the DC/OS overlay network, security by default and other features for big data applications, “If we can provide that in a scalable, fault-tolerant way, I think that will be really valuable.”
It’s targeting with the offering platform operators who want to provide Kubernetes as a Service to developers.
In a blog post, Knaup points out that:
- Kubernetes can run alongside production-grade data services on a shared DC/OS cluster.
- In this “managed Kubernetes” model, Mesosphere DC/OS will allow you to run multiple Kubernetes clusters of different versions alongside each other.
Kubernetes on DC/OS beta will be available on Monday, Sept. 11 at https://dcos.io/install/.
“This is further evidence the container management and orchestration software market is characterized by mixed use, with Kubernetes the clear leader, but a number of other projects and vendors that are also used fairly broadly,” said 451 Research analyst Jay Lyman.
Mesos has been around longer and has strong connections to the Marathon scheduler, as well as big data applications and data services technologies, including Hadoop, Cassandra, Spark and Kafka, he pointed out.
“While it is common to see container-using enterprises leveraging Kubernetes, it is just as common for them to be leveraging it integrated with or alongside other technologies, such as Apcera, CoreOS, Nomad, Rancher, Swarm or the public cloud container services from Amazon, Google and Microsoft. … We’re seeing more vendors supporting more and more container management and orchestration options, perpetuating that mixed use.”
At the same time, the DC/OS 1.10 release extends its capabilities in:
- Security, including custom certification authority integration and file-based secrets that enable operators to securely run multi-tenant services and applications to securely share digital certificates.
- Upgrades, including the ability to easily back up and restore application configurations, perform live upgrades of data services and automatically validate DC/OS upgrades.
- Networking, with an edge load balancer. The high-performance L4/L7 ingress load balancer makes it easy to expose any application or service inside a DC/OS cluster to the outside world.
- Plus an Enhanced Services SDK that makes it easy to add new services to the DC/OS catalog. DC/OS 1.10 now certifies production-ready data services, including Apache Spark, Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka, Elastic, HDFS, Confluent Kafka, and Datastax DSE.
Apcera, CoreOS, Google, Mesosphere and Microsoft are sponsors of The New Stack.
