Mesosphere, creators of the Datacenter Operating System (DCOS) for managing cloud and datacenter resources at scale, today at MesosCon Europe announced two new projects developed in collaboration with EMC Corporation that will help accelerate adoption of external storage volumes within Apache Mesos architectures, and that will be available as common services in the Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System (DCOS). 

Cloud-native applications are at the center of businesses that are differentiating through software and disrupting industries.  Mesos has become a platform of choice for operations teams and developers that support the lifecycle of these applications. Much like traditional applications, the information inside the applications is critical.  But at the same time, the requirements on data have dramatically increased in scale and complexity to meet end-user expectations.

Mesosphere and EMC expect the output from this collaboration will help drive external storage into new areas and expand use cases for Mesos by seamlessly enabling developers to leverage external storage resources. EMC is participating in this collaboration through EMC {code}, a team of open source and developer advocates within EMC.

New Drivers Extend Storage Resources to Mesos

Both companies have jointly developed a new Docker Volume Driver Interface Isolation Module (mesos-module-dvdi) that resides within the Mesos agent and enables existing Docker volume drivers to interoperate with Mesos. They have also jointly developed a new Docker Volume Driver CLI (dvd-cli) that leverages the existing Docker code base to ensure compatibility with the Volume Driver interface. With these two projects, existing volume plugins that work for Docker can now work natively with any Mesos framework or agent.

In Apache Mesos today, frameworks and applications that consume resources typically leverage direct attached storage. External volume support will extend a Mesos agents' ability to leverage external or network attached storage for tasks. This will extend DCOS' capabilities by:

●      Opening the storage platform ecosystem to all of Mesos

●      Reducing management complexity of external storage

●      Allowing consumers of applications to specify new or existing volumes with their jobs

"Combining existing Mesos frameworks with external volume support is an important step for the Mesosphere and Apache Mesos communities, and EMC customers," said Ben Hindman, co-creator of Apache Mesos, and co-founder and chief architect at Mesosphere. "Now DCOS can meet persistent storage requirements with support for storage platforms such as EMC ScaleIO, OpenStack Cinder, AWS EBS and more. This immediately enables persistent container solutions from companies like EMC for Mesos and DCOS frameworks."

EMC {code} is an open source and developer advocate program within EMC. The two projects announced with Mesosphere at MesosCon Europe today signal the initial efforts of a close collaboration between the two companies to make storage a first class citizen within Mesos architectures, pooling datacenter and cloud resources to appear as a single computer abstraction.

"The EMC community is very excited about these new capabilities for Mesosphere," said Josh Bernstein, Vice President in EMC's Emerging Technologies Division. "One of the most significant challenges that customers face is extending persistent storage to Mesos use cases. The collaboration between EMC {code} and Mesosphere will help deliver a great new capability and will continue to drive storage into the data center operating system and distributed application space.  Customers are very excited about exposing software-based distributed storage platforms like EMC ScaleIO to Mesos."