News

Mesosphere Open Sources Distributed Enterprise App Software

• By David Ramel
• 04/19/2016

Backed by dozens of partners, Mesosphere today announced the beta release of its open source DC/OS software, which acts as an OS for managing modern distributed applications in container-based datacenters.

The software, stemming from the open source Apache Mesos project, provides abstraction that makes an enterprise datacenter appear as a single computer, able to leverage pooled resources -- such as CPU, memory, storage -- and manage microservices, containers (such as Docker), Big Data analytics and infrastructure-agnostic apps running on bare-metal implementations or in the cloud.

Mesosphere, which developed a commercial enterprise product based on Mesos, is guiding the new open source offering, which still leverages the open source Mesos code but which also now includes newly open sourced software that was formerly proprietary, such as its GUI and Minuteman load balancers.

It contains more than 30 component technologies, developed in part with the cooperation of more than 60 partners, including Accenture, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Microsoft.

"Derived from Mesosphere's revolutionary Datacenter Operating System, the 100 percent open source DC/OS offers powerful capabilities for container operations at scale and single-click, app-store-like installation of 20+ complex distributed systems (called DC/OS 'services'), including HDFS, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra and more," the company said in a statement today. "DC/OS lets every company deploy the automated infrastructure powering applications at some of the world's largest technology companies."

A Mesosphere blog post expounded on that theme. "DC/OS helps companies adopt the advanced operational and architectural practices of organizations such as Apple, Yelp, Netflix and Twitter (and, at a broader level, Facebook and Google) without having to reinvent the wheel or hire scores of distributed systems engineers," the post said. "DC/OS brings this type of advanced datacenter environment and application platform to anyone, anywhere they wish to run it."

Mesosphere said it would continue to sell its related enterprise offering, Mesosphere Enterprise DC/OS, formerly called DCOS Enterprise Edition, which incorporates enterprise features such as improved security, performance, networking, compliance, monitoring and multi-team support that are missing in the pure open source project.