Google would like its Kubernetes project to become the standard for interacting with large computing clusters and containers. Mesosphere, which also has a strong focus on containers, is trying to establish its technologies as the default operating system for the datacenter. At first, those two projects may seem as if they should be at odds with each other, but as both Google and Mesosphere announced today, Mesosphere will now integrate Kubernetes into its Datacenter Operating System (DCOS).
In its own data centers, Google uses its Borg cluster management service. Google only started publicly talking about Borg a few days ago, but the company is very open about the fact that Kubernetes was heavily influenced by Borg.
“Kubernetes was designed from the start to make these capabilities available to everyone, and built by the same engineers that built the system internally known as Borg,” Google Product Manager Craig McLuckie writes today.
The two companies argue that this collaboration between them brings the best of Kubernetes and Mesosphere to developers — and especially those in the enterprise.
The main idea behind Mesosphere is that developers get to treat the data center as if it were a single computer. Apache Mesos — the open-source project Mesosphere is based on — then figures out how to schedule and distribute jobs across machines so that the available resources are all used as efficiently as possible.
Thanks to this collaboration, developers can now use Mesosphere’s DCOS interface to also manage Kubernetes clusters and get access to all of the advanced features Mesosphere offers and that haven’t been built into Kubernetes yet (think high availability, advanced scheduling, etc.). Using DCOS, enterprises can deploy Kubernetes across thousands of nodes, both bare-metal and virtualized machines that can run on-premise and in the cloud.
As the two companies also note, using Kubernetes and Mesosphere together allows Kubernetes applications to share a cluster with other data center services like Hadoop or Cassandra, which means enterprises don’t have to manage (and pay for) two or more separate clusters to run their applications.
“We’ve worked with Google to package a robust common stack for running cloud-native applications anywhere,” Mesosphere CEO and co-founder Florian Leibert said in a statement today. “With Mesosphere’s Enterprise Kubernetes integrated into the Mesosphere DCOS, we are giving enterprises the first real architecture that allows cloud-native applications to run in a rich, multi-service environment with other services like Spark and Hadoop, in a reliable, secure and elastic way.”
As the Mesosphere team also notes, it will also offer enterprises support for running Kubernetes.