Mesosphere Delivers on Promise of Marathon Container Orchestration Framework

As part of a concerted effort to make container orchestration a natural extension of a modern framework for holistically managing the entire IT environment, Mesosphere today announced that version 1.0 of Marathon, now generally available, can be used to support stateless and stateful applications.

In addition, Mesosphere announced Velocity, a continuous integration and development framework optimized for containers, while also revealing that both Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise have participated in a new $73.5 million of financing. Matt Trifiro, chief marketing officer for Mesosphere, says that participation of Microsoft and HPE is significant because it signals the fact that Mesosphere will be working with both of them on future product launches.

Trifiro says the ability to support both stateful and stateless applications will prove to be critical for IT organizations. Rather than having to build separate clusters for different classes of applications they will be able to use a common cluster to support both types of applications. Other new features in Marathon 1.0 include support for multi-tenant authentication and authorization, the ability to create application groups within complex multi-tier applications, simplified port management, and the ability to isolate network groups. Following the release of 1.0 of Maraton Mesosphere is also promising additional enhancements in the realm of high availability, seamless upgrades and privacy for the open source container management framework.

But Trifiro says that most significant attribute of Marathon is how tightly it is integrated within the broader Mesosphere Data Center Operating System (DCOS) environment. Trifiro notes in a modern IT environment application logic needs to be able to push and pull large amounts of Big Data in and out of containerized applications. Mesosphere DCOS enables those applications to accomplish that task without putting any additional burden on the IT operations team.

With other container orchestration frameworks the internal IT organization not has to manage the process manually, they also have to do all the integration work needed to make a container orchestration framework become operational within the context of a larger IT environment.

In a similar fashion, Trifiro notes that Mesosphere has created Velocity to integrate the Jenkins continuous integration framework with Mesosphere. Rather than having to configure and deploy Jenkins on their own an IT organization can now manage an instance of Jenkins as a much higher level of abstraction, says Trifiro.

The degree to which container orchestration frameworks will be integrated within the context of a larger IT management framework remains to be seen. But Trifero says that in order for containers to be deployed in production environment IT organizations are going to insist on a way to manage them within the context of everything else that goes on in the data center. For that reason Trifero says Mesosphere contends that in terms of DevOps container orchestration frameworks are just “table stakes.” In fact, a container orchestration framework is really more of a feature of a data center operating system than a standalone product, says Trifiro.

Obviously, there are a lot entities battling for control over the future of container orchestration management. After all, if containers are the future of enterprise computing whoever ultimately provides the mechanism for managing them stands to gain much at the expense of all others.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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