With the continual rise in new technologies and with the stress of moving to the cloud, digital transformation is crucial for organizations in all industries to keep afloat. Companies are under more pressure than ever to develop new and innovative business models, products, and services to keep pace with increasing market demands and to address changing customer expectations. But in order to power this growth and innovation, companies need to do more than just invest in technologies designed to improve business processes on the front end. They also need to drive operational excellence at the back-end. To achieve this, business need an agile, modern data center — one that not only provides the simplicity, scalability, and security required to support mission-critical applications, but also one that can be managed with ease.
Mesosphere, a San Francisco-based company dedicated to helping enterprises bring the data center into the modern era, believes that modern data centers require a new software architecture in order to manage and aggregate the hyper-scale deployments of thousands of servers. And Mesosphere believes they have the answer: the Mesosphere DC/OS.
SourceForge had the chance to speak with Florian Leibert, the CEO of Mesosphere, to discuss DC/OS and how this solution is serving as the digital backbone for today’s modern enterprises.
Q: Can you please share with our readers a brief history of Mesosphere? What is the company’s mission, and who are some current customers that trust your solutions?
Florian Leibert, the CEO of Mesosphere
A: Mesosphere was founded in 2013 to build upon the foundation laid by our experience working with infrastructure at web scale startups. At the time, I was working at Twitter, and a childhood friend of mine, Benjamin Hindman, was working on his Ph.D thesis at the University of California at Berkeley. That thesis turned into the Apache Mesos project, which abstracts CPU, memory, storage, and other compute resources away from machines (physical or virtual), enabling fault-tolerant and elastic distributed systems to easily be built and run effectively. I brought Ben on-board to help solve Twitter’s infamous ‘Fail Whale’ problem, in part using the Mesos technology.
When the Twitter servers were pushed beyond capacity, Twitter simply stopped working and displayed the infamous “Fail Whale” graphic. Next, I joined Airbnb, along with my other co-founder Tobi Knaup, to solve similar infrastructure challenges. Through this work, we realized that every company would be facing similar challenges and there must be a way to make Mesos technology more accessible.
Today, Mesosphere is democratizing the modern infrastructure originally pioneered at companies like Twitter and AirBnB to quickly deliver data-driven services on any datacenter or cloud. We are helping companies build and scale world changing technology, and make them easy to adopt and use by mainstream enterprise IT teams and startups alike. The company today has more than 125 customers, including NBCUniversal, HERE, Royal Caribbean, PVH Corp., and Verizon, plus more than ten contracts of $1 million or more.
Q: Tell us a bit more about the Apache Mesos project. What motivated Mesosphere to pursue using this open source project as the heart of DC/OS?
A: Mesosphere is a strong proponent of open source software, with strong ties to the Apache Mesos project. Implementing Mesos, however, comes with a certain level of complexity and requires skilled engineers to deploy. Mesosphere was created to simplify this implementation and make distributed computing more accessible.
DC/OS, our flagship product, turns an entire data center or cloud into one big computer that’s easy to run and manage. We’ve also open sourced DC/OS, creating opportunities for companies large and small to benefit from highly available and scalable infrastructure.
Q: Let’s get down to basics: what is the Mesosphere DC/OS? How is its architecture different from similar platforms currently available in the market?
A: DC/OS uniquely spans several development and implementation spheres including fast data, microservices and hybrid cloud to enable the modern world of data-intensive applications. This increases the flexibility companies have in terms of service delivery and enables them to leverage the best economics at any one point in time. DC/OS also hides much of the complexity around multi-cloud management.
Businesses today are buried in both data and complexity. The infrastructure required to manage and process this data has stretched the coping capacity of many large organizations. What they need is a comprehensive command and control operating system that facilitates the implementation of new services while also dynamically allocating secure resources.
Mesosphere essentially creates a layer on top of hardware – whether on premise, in the cloud, or a hybrid – that handles all the servers, virtual machines and cloud instances in the background and lets an application draw from a single pool of resources like CPU power and memory. In these ways, DC/OS serves as a digital backbone for a modern enterprise.
Q: How is the Internet of Things (IoT) in conjunction with real-time, data-driven customer interaction solutions (in addition to real-time business insight platforms) changing today’s business landscape?
A: IoT in all its forms – whether collecting jet engine performance data from a myriad of sensors to the millions of financial transactions made daily – creates an enormous volume of data. 90 percent of the data on the internet has been created since 2016, according to an IBM Marketing Cloud study. This big data is fuel for digital transformation, powering customer interactions with timely and contextual recommendations, and informing business decisions through predictive analytics increasingly powered by AI algorithms.
For instance, the automotive industry is experiencing a fundamental shift from engaging with customers only when they bring vehicles in for maintenance, to delivering personalized and always connected services. This fundamental shift requires a different approach to enterprise architecture that is closer to a software services business. Six of the world’s leading automotive and automotive technology companies are building their infrastructure on Mesosphere DC/OS. That’s because our platform enables businesses to automate operations of any modern platform service from an open partner ecosystem on any infrastructure or cloud, with a resilient, secure, and production-proven platform. This means faster time to value of new services, automated operations, and savings on cloud or infrastructure costs.
All of this requires a scalable digital infrastructure to collect, stream, transform, and extract the right information when it is needed which is often in real time. Modern applications for these purposes are increasingly developed using microservices, data services and containers – all of which are core pillars of DC/OS.
Q: What are the advantages of deploying Spark, Akka, Cassandra, Kafka, and Apache Mesos (a.k.a. the SMACK stack)? And what benefits can your enterprise-ready open source DC/OS offering give to small and medium-sized businesses?
A: The SMACK stack is becoming the standard for building the kind of data-intensive, modern enterprise applications that are the hallmark of digital transformation. This new stack is ideal for applications required by autonomous vehicles and other data-intensive workloads. DC/OS is a single operating platform that makes running the SMACK stack and over 100 other open source and commercial services effortless on any infrastructure. DC/OS open source users like Astronomer benefit from modern application stacks, just like other customers, and are building robust, data-intensive platforms to scale their business.
Q: What innovations in the big data and business communication industries do you think will emerge in the coming years? And how is Mesosphere preparing for these changes?
A: Similar to how technology advanced rapidly during the space race, the push now for autonomous vehicles and AI applications is driving tremendous innovation. No doubt this will generate many useful applications that more fully incorporate the edge, cloud and data centers into a seamless, high-functioning system for data management.
In the coming years, giant strides will be made in integration platforms to unite disparate infrastructures creating a single holistic computing and network resource. This will lead to an explosion of horizontally integrated applications, many harnessing artificial intelligence and leading to radically better experiences.
Q: Technology is progressing faster than ever. So how can a business’ human capital (i.e. data scientists, engineers, and IT professionals) keep up with this rapid growth?
A: The pace of innovation creates new challenges everyday. Seemingly by the time a technology has gained a foothold, it’s already fallen out of favor and is being replaced by something new. Keeping pace in the world of digital transformation requires constant learning and adopting new patterns.
Ongoing training is clearly critical. With the growing popularity of new technologies and tools – like the SMACK stack we discussed earlier – it’s more crucial than ever that businesses are providing access and training to these modern tools and infrastructure, and that recruiters are investing in people with the right skill sets.
For instance, as the value of data continues to increase, it’s likely that we’ll see data scientists in even higher demand than developers in the coming years. Understanding the new tools necessary to execute real time decision making and machine learning will be paramount to future success.
Q: What can we expect from Mesosphere in the not too distant future? Are there any new projects you’re currently working on that you would like to share with us?
A: We’ll be adding new features with every DC/OS release as we push toward multi-cloud and elastic cloud bursting. We recently added Kubernetes in beta, which we continue to test and improve with our customers. We’ll continue to add the latest services, like machine learning and AI tools, to empower our customers through data and services orchestration.
About Mesosphere
Mesosphere is leading the enterprise transformation toward distributed computing and hybrid cloud. Mesosphere DC/OS is the premier platform for building, deploying, and elastically scaling modern applications and big data. DC/OS makes running containers, data services, and microservices easy across your own hardware and cloud instances. Mesosphere was founded in 2013 by the architects of hyperscale infrastructures at Airbnb and Twitter and the co-creator of Apache Mesos. Mesosphere is headquartered in San Francisco with additional offices in New York; Hamburg, Germany; and Beijing, China. Mesosphere’s investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Microsoft.