Six Mistakes that Lead to Poor Enterprise Software Adoption
A few years ago, an open source project called Mesos created simpler cluster management software that eventually became an Apache Foundation project. Relied on extensively by companies such as Airbnb, Netflix and Twitter at true Web scale, Mesos later gave rise to Mesosphere, a provider of a commercially supported version of Mesos known as the Mesosphere Data Center Operating System.
Now not only is Mesos being ported from Linux to Windows Server 2016 with direct help from Microsoft, organizations such as Verizon are now making use of the Mesosphere Data Center Operating System to automate the deployment of both internal and external cloud services. In addition, instances of the Mesosphere Data Center Operating System are already running on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) public clouds.
Benjamin Hindman, one of the original co-creators of Apache Mesos, and chief architect and co-founder of Mesosphere, says all these efforts collectively set the stage for turning hybrid cloud computing into an everyday IT reality. For the first time, Hindman says, IT organizations will soon see a common abstraction layer across both Linux and Windows. That abstraction layer will make it feasible for a single IT administrator to manage thousands of servers in and out of the cloud. In addition, Hindman noted that “cloudbursting” between private and public clouds will become a lot simpler to implement using a common abstraction layer.
Hindman says that to a large degree, Mesos is actually fulfilling the original promise of POSIX, which was supposed to provider a common portable operating system interface for Windows, Linux and Windows systems. Mesos takes that concept a step further by giving IT organizations more granular control of the resources running on a server in a way that can be implemented across multiple operating systems.
Naturally, it will take a while for the heterogeneous promise of Mesos to be fulfilled. But as IT organizations start to cast about for ways to become more agile in a world full of diverse server platforms, it would now appear that Mesos is going to play a significant role in the management of modern data center environments.
