Google is drawing from the work of the open-source community to offer its cloud customers a service to better manage their clusters of virtual servers. On Monday, the Google Cloud Platform started offering the commercial version of the open-source Mesos cluster management software, offered by Mesosphere. With the Mesosphere software, “You can create a truly multitenant cluster, and that drives up utilization and simplifies operations,” said Florian Leibert, co-founder and CEO of Mesosphere. Leibert was also the engineering lead at Twitter who introduced Mesos to the social media company.
It doesn’t have a enticing name like cloud computing or the appconomy, but cluster management really is some sexy stuff. Important, too: Done right, it’s the thing that makes the web run by letting companies including Google, Facebook and Twitter scale to billions of users without spending every spare dollar and every spare second of engineer time managing their servers. And now that Google is in the business of selling IT, it wants everyone to know this and experience it themselves. I explained this in June when Google announced its open source container-management technology called Kubernetes in June, and again last month when Google signed up a list of big-name partners to support it. On Monday, Google took things a step further by announcing a partnership with Mesosphere that will let Google Compute Engine users spin up a self-managing cluster in a few clicks. Mesosphere is a startup that’s built on top of the Apache Mesos technology. Mesos is essentially an open source version of the system that Google uses to automate its data centers, with end result being that many applications and services can share the same set of resources simultaneously because the system ensures that each gets everything it needs in order to run optimally. Mesophere makes it easier to deploy Mesos and achieve those benefits, and also adds some tooling on top of it.
