We could not be more excited to announce our partnership with Mesosphere on the release of Open-Source DC/OS with OpenDCRE integration.
Since the founding of Vapor IO, we have shared a common vision with Mesosphere: that the modern data center should work and appear to users like a large computer, which runs various workloads. We began that process by building and releasing OpenDCRE, which Cole Crawford, CEO of Vapor IO, refers to as “A 21st century, open source alternative to the gratuitous differentiation offered by existing data center management products for rack-scale control and automation.” The process continues as Vapor IO and Mesosphere join forces to enable DC/OS to take advantage of all the OpenDCRE has to offer.
As any student of operating systems will know, an operating system manages resources and provides a convenient interface by which workloads may be executed and managed. Extrapolating that theory out to the data center, a data center really is just another collection of resources – servers, storage, memory, network, etc. – and the workloads that run across those resources have traditionally been managed intensively using heterogeneous toolsets that focus only on limited views of those resources and workloads. Additionally, the environmental and physical characteristics beyond IT gear have often been ignored, as gaining access to that telemetry has proven too difficult or expensive. This all changes with DC/OS and OpenDCRE.
DC/OS is easy to use, and makes the installation and operation of a production cluster simple and straightforward – just like installing and running an operating system on any other device. That being said, setting up a cluster is just the first step in the process in the data center – just as installing that operating system is just the beginning on a standalone device. However, the state of the art in the data center, for far too long, has been comprised of a set of separate processes — where setting up a cluster, and managing the actual workload have often been tasks delegated to disparate components.
With DC/OS, there is an end-to-end ownership of the workload lifecycle, where resources can be managed, marshaled and monitored intelligently using the same level of resource meta-information that is present in a modern operating system. This is where OpenDCRE comes in – OpenDCRE provides best-of-breed telemetry, unavailable anywhere else, to DC/OS to allow resource management decisions to be complete and finely tuned. OpenDCRE provides deep real-time visibility into the physical infrastructure, power, environment and landscape of the data center that can aid resource management within DC/OS.
The simple, secure OpenDCRE REST API brings together an ever-growing variety of hardware management and monitoring capabilities that provide DC/OS with increased situational awareness and control that help make an already strong product even stronger.
Just as an operating system bridges the physical and virtual worlds, DC/OS and OpenDCRE work together to provide a harmonious and powerful set of capabilities to manage the physical space (data center infrastructure and environment) and the virtual space (containers and workloads) across those shared resources.
Another great and important point related to this collaboration is that this complete platform – both DC/OS and OpenDCRE – are freely-available, open-source projects that are built by and for the community. Everything you need comes ready to run out of the box, and is not feature-limited. We use OpenDCRE to power our own commercial Vapor CORE product, and we have contributed those capabilities to the broader community, just as Mesosphere has contributed DC/OS.
We’ve long admired the great work that Mesosphere has been doing – DC/OS is a fantastic product, and has quickly become the easiest way to run containers in production – and we’re very excited that OpenDCRE and Mesosphere’s DC/OS can work together on the shared goal of taking the next step in evolving computing and the data center world.
