Data Backup Digest

Originally launched in 2013, the team at Mesosphere has been working toward one ultimate goal: the release of their Datacenter Operating System, also known as DCOS. While their efforts took several years, the company has finally announced the release of their DCOS product. Moreover, the company even announced a free version of the software for the use by the general public. Enterprises who wish to take advantage of the new DCOS will need to purchase a user license.

The main point behind the Datacenter Operating System is to give organizations increased centralization and accessibility by allowing them to view their entire datacenter operation as a single entity. As such, IT administrators are able to ensure maximum allocation and usage of all available resources. Users of the public, free version of DCOS are able to view all of their public cloud deployments as a single entity.

Michael Hausenblas, datacenter application architect with Mesosphere, explained the point of the Mesosphere DCOS in a recent interview. He was quoted as saying: “The Mesosphere DCOS is a new kind of operating system that spans all of the machines in a datacenter or cloud and pools them together so that they behave like one big computer. Mesos, the Apache open source project, is the kernel inside this operating system. This is analogous to how it works in the Linux world. You have the Linux kernel, which isn't much use by itself, and then you have a distro like Ubuntu where they've added all of the system services and tooling around the kernel to make it a complete product. We've done the same for the datacenter.”

Florian Leibert, Mesosphere’s co-founder and CEO, spoke about the need for an operating system such as Mesosphere. He was quoted as saying: “Applications in the datacenter are driving requirements for a new class of operating system—a datacenter operating system—and enterprises need a flexible, scalable, and consistent way to deploy and manage large-scale distributed systems on-prem, in the cloud, or hybrid. This is the same core technology that runs infrastructure at companies like Twitter, Yelp, Groupon and Apple’s Siri.”

Primary Benefits

Mesospshere’s website lists three of the primary benefits that are associated with their new DCOS. This includes the ability to deploy and scale systems instantaneously, full automation and resource pooling as well as the ability to run applications via the cloud, virtual machines or bare metal systems without having to modify the existing code whatsoever.
Furthermore, the Mesosphere DCOS currently boasts more than 40 services, all of which can be installed quickly and easily with a single command. Some of their current applications include Hadoop, Spark, Jenkins, Kubernetes and more.

Availability

The enterprise edition of the Mesosphere DCOS is available as of July 2015. While the public, free version of Mesosphere DCOS has also been released, it is currently only available to users of Amazon’s cloud service. Users of Microsoft Azure or the Google Compute Engine are currently able to use a beta version of the software.