Mesosphere Adds Docker Support To Its Mesos-Based Operating System For The Data Center
Mesos is an open source project that helps developers manage server clusters more efficiently while providing resource isolation. It’s currently being used by the likes of Twitter and Airbnb, where much of the technology was developed. Google also runs a very similar system called “Borg” – which it developed independently long before Mesos came into existence – to keep its data centers humming.
Mesosphere, an early-stage startup founded by ex-Twitter and Airbnb engineer Florian Leibert and former Airbnb engineer Tobias Knaup, is currently spearheading the development of Mesos. Just like other startups that focus on open source, Mesosphere also hopes to sell additional services in the long run, but as Leibert told me, the focus right now is on building out the Mesos ecosystem and evangelizing the concept.
Mesos, which is now hosted by the Apache Foundation, was born of a research project at Berkeley, which included then-PhD student Benjamin Hindman who later introduced it to Twitter (where he is still a technical leader).
The high-level idea here, as Leibert explained to me, is that Mesos is essentially the kernel of an operating system that looks at the data center as a multi-core CPU. That operating system needs more than just a kernel, though, and all the components around it is what Mesosphere is now focusing on. At AirBnB, Leiber also built the Chronos scheduler, a cron replacement for automatically starting and stopping services (and handling failures) that runs on top of Mesos. The other part of the Mesos puzzle so far is Marathon, which Leibert described to me as the equivalent of init.d – the first process that’s started on a Unix system – for the Mesos ecosystem. Marathon provides the Mesos framework with an API for starting, stopping and scaling services (and Chronos could be one of those services).
Adding Docker support to Mesos, Leibert told me, is something others have tried before, but it’s actually very hard to do. Thanks to its intimate knowledge of Mesos, however, the six-person team at Mesosphere managed to integrate the system.
With these building blocks in place, Leibert said, the team now also plans to add some user-friendly interfaces to its framework to make it a bit more accessible to new users. Mostly, however, Mesosphere plans to listen to the Mesos community and then add the components its users are asking for.