Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Saturday, April 20, 2024

Mesosphere Adds Kubernetes in Platform Upgrade 

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Micro-services specialist Mesosphere is bringing the leading container orchestrator to its datacenter operating system as part of its latest release of its flagship platform.

Version 1.10 of the company's DC/OS includes a beta version of Kubernetes, the de facto standard application container orchestrator. Mesosphere said the upgrade would allow datacenter operators to offer application developers Kubernetes for Docker container orchestration "as a service." That capability would run alongside other data services or legacy applications.

The San Francisco-based startup also stressed security in its latest platform release, noting that micro-services, data services and legacy apps could run on the same infrastructure in isolation from one another, a key security feature, without maintaining high availability.

Its embrace of Kubernetes also aligns Mesosphere more closely with the container orchestrator's developer, Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL), which has lately been launching cloud partnerships designed to "remove friction" from hybrid cloud deployments. Kubernetes emerged from the search giant's container-based internal systems. It was released to the open source community in 2015.

(The creators of Kubernetes formed a new startup last year called Heptio, which is focused on cloud native computing while "making Kubernetes accessible to the enterprise living in a multi-cloud world.")

Running Kubernetes on top of Mesophere's DC/OS in meant to enable users to connect to data services from containers running on Kubernetes—and vice versa, the company said. The automation of data services required for most containerized applications mimics in the datacenter or across hybrid cloud infrastructure the container engines provided by large public cloud providers.

"We founded Mesosphere [in 2013] with the goal of bringing the tools and capabilities of web-scale giants to companies of all sizes," CEO Florian Leibert noted in a statement. "We are taking this mission one step further by providing our customers with the full suite of tools they need to build, deploy and operate next-generation applications."

Among the security features added in its latest release are a series of tools intended to allow datacenter operators to run multi-tenant services along with applications that securely share digital certificates used to exchange data securely.

Meanwhile, performance upgrades include new disaster recovery features for backing up and restoring application configurations or to perform live upgrades of data services.

Mesosphere said the latest release of its DC/OS along with the beta version of Kubernetes running the upgraded platform would be available on Sept. 11.

Separately, Mesosphere also said this week it is collaborating with Portworx, a provider of container data services for DevOps. The partnership includes customer support for running big data applications in production on DC/OS and the Portworx PX-Enterprise platform. Portworx, Los Altos, Calif., offers persistent volume support for Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka, Hadoop and other big data frameworks running on the Mesosphere platform.

About the author: George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).

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