Mesosphere Platform Adds Scheduler, Automation Tools
The Mesosphere, the datacenter operating system ecosystem formed by the company of the same name, continues to expand with the addition of a scheduler designed to determine whether workloads run best on-premise or in the cloud along with new application container management software.
Vapor IO and Rancher Labs both announced Wednesday (June 1) they would support the Mesos container orchestration platform. Rancher Labs said its container management software combined with the Apache Mesos scheduler could be used to automate the setup and upgrading of Mesos infrastructure. Meanwhile, Vapor I/O said it would integrate a "currency based" scheduler with Mesosphere's datacenter operating system (DC/OS) to help determine whether to use public cloud or on-premises platforms to run workloads.
Vapor IO, Austin, Texas, said it would integrate its datacenter runtime environment with Mesosphere's DCOS to create the workload scheduler. The tool gauges workload requirements and the associated costs of running them in datacenters. The combination is promoted as providing IT managers with insights into "underlying infrastructure variables" for workloads running in public clouds versus internal datacenters. The tool also takes into account "basic costs incurred by physical infrastructure below the rack," the company said.
The combination would provide "the ability to understand and orchestrate an application in context of the cost associated with the underlying infrastructure, be it public cloud, [colocation] or on-premise," Vapor IO CEO Cole Crawford noted in a statement. The tool would provide a "performance per watt per currency metric," Cole added.
Mesosphere's DC/OS is designed to ease installation and optimize resource utilization for application containers, cloud computing and big data. Mesosphere CEO Florian Leibert said the addition of Vapor IO's runtime environment would help users of its platform "figure out what infrastructure to run on in the first place."
San Francisco-based Mesosphere announced an industry alliance in April backing the beta release of DC/OS, which is based on Apache Mesos. The initial release of DC/OS expanded earlier capabilities to include running application containers at scale along with "single-click" installation of more than 20 services.
DC/OS is further touted as allowing users to deploy automated infrastructure to run applications and services that include Apache Cassandra, Kafka and Spark. The platform combines the Mesos distributed systems kernel with Mesosphere's Marathon container management tool.
Also jumping on the DC/OS bandwagon this week is Rancher Labs, the container management software vendor based in Cupertino, Calif. The company's platform is designed to deploy and manage containers across private and public clouds as well as virtualization clusters or bare-metal servers.
Along with automating setup and upgrades, the partners said running Mesos on the Rancher platform would ease deployment of Mesos frameworks like Aurora, Hadoop and Kafka. Upgrades could be automated as new versions of the frameworks are released.
The partnership would also leverage Rancher Labs' networking, storage and load balancing services with applications running on Mesos.
Ranchers Labs also claimed its is the only container management platform currently supporting container scheduling and orchestration tools that include Mesos, Google's (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Kubernetes and Docker Swarm.
