Mesosphere opens test access to its OS for data centers

About operating systems for data centers began to speak relatively recently. And just six months ago , the Mesosphere company announced the successful development of such an operating system. Now the company has made a second statement: it opens up test access to its OS, while during the test period the Mesosphere OS will not be available to everyone, but will be provided at the request of interested organizations.

It is worth noting that some organizations and startups have received such access. For example, Kubernetes , a third-party Google project, is now fully integrated with the Mesosphere OS. The integration process began last year, and now, as we see, has been successfully completed. By the way, the project from Mesosphere interested not only representatives of the telecommunications sector, but also investors, who have already allocated about $ 50 million for this project. Other investors include Andreessen-Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, SV Angel and Fuel Capital.

What is an OS for a data center, and why is it needed?

')
The Mesosphere company did not immediately start developing an operating system. About a year ago, a startup showed a number of cloud tools for DCs, which were called Apache Mesos. At the same time, the code of these software products was opened, and such giants as Twitter and Airbnb almost immediately began to use the company's achievements.



A few months later, the company thought about creating its own OS, which would include the applications and tools created by the company earlier, as well as new software products. At the same time, a common shell should play the role of a control panel for its applications, which, as planned, should cover all aspects of DC management.

The OS is called DCOS (Data Center Operation System), and it is represented, as mentioned above, by a set of data center management tools, with an individual user interface. Using such tools, the operator can, in a short time, deploy, for example, a set of software for work in the Hadoop system for the Cassandra and Accumulo databases and the container management system Kubernetes.

The OS is equipped with a graphical management interface, which greatly simplifies and speeds up the process of working with the necessary resources at the moment, which can be transferred without delay to the operator panel.

System features

DCOS allows you to manage resources in DC of any size. According to the developers of the system, the OS can cover the infrastructure of 50 thousand nodes (the beginning of system development), with an increase by an order of magnitude by the end of 2016.

You can work not only with the graphical interface, but also with the command line. However, the graphical interface significantly speeds up the management of all data center systems.

The OS is compatible with a number of Linux distributions, including CentOS, Redhat, Ubuntu, and CoreOS, plus cloud services from companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

According to the developers, the OS can manage any data center, and over time the product will be improved and refined.

Time to collect stones

About a week ago, the company announced its intention to open access to its OS for companies that wish to try it out at work. Until now, there have been companies that have gained access to the operating system, while there are both positive reviews and negative ones. Now a large number of companies will be able to assess the performance of the system independently.

It is worth noting that Mesosphere produces two versions of the system: free, which will be presented in partnership with cloud service providers, and a paid corporate one.

By the way, earlier this year, Google joined forces with the Mesosphere to facilitate the launch of the OS. Now the operating system is compatible with the Google Cloud Platform. The commercial version of the OS for DC was also developed with Google, as mentioned above, this is a technology that now works in Kubernetes. According to Google, now access to Kubernetes will receive a new class of users and companies who can appreciate the merits of the corporate version of the OS for DC. The Mesosphere developers say that their OS will help the data center owners to work much more effectively with the DC facilities, with the possibility of deploying new software systems in the shortest possible time.