Sunday, February 15, 2015

Apache Mesos, Data Center Operating System (DCOS)

A16z Podcast: The Datacenter Needs an Operating System | Andreessen Horowitz
"Mesosphere’s Benjamin Hindman, the co-creator of Apache Mesos (which came out ofthe U.C. Berkeley AMPLab), joins Steven Sinofsky, a16z board partner (who formerly oversaw the Windows division at Microsoft) for a discussion about all-things-OS."


"Apache Mesos 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."


"What is Mesos? A distributed systems kernel
Mesos is built using the same principles as the Linux kernel, only at a different level of abstraction. The Mesos kernel runs on every machine and provides applications (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Elastic Search) with API’s for resource management and scheduling across entire datacenter and cloud environments. Project Features:
  • Scalability to 10,000s of nodes
  • Fault-tolerant replicated master and slaves using ZooKeeper
  • Support for Docker containers
  • Native isolation between tasks with Linux Containers
  • Multi-resource scheduling (memory, CPU, disk, and ports)
  • Java, Python and C++ APIs for developing new parallel applications
  • Web UI for viewing cluster state"

This is raising level of abstraction in data center to "task", that could include multiple processes running on virtual or physical servers, or preferably in containers.  Already used at scale in Twitter, Netflix, PayPal, Airbnb, and others: mesos.apache.org/documentation/latest/powered-by-mesos/

Mesos @ InfoQ



mobile: Cyanogen: Android + Windows?

if you can't beat them, join them - Wiktionary

Microsoft to invest in Cyanogen, which hopes to take Android from Google | Ars Technica
"According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft will be investing in Cyanogen, Inc., the Android ROM builder. The report says that Microsoft would be a "minority investor" in a $70 million round of financing that values Cyanogen in the "high hundreds of millions.""
With current smartphone hardware, there is no technical limitation to run multiple platforms, Android JavaVM and WinRT .NET for example, as well as Chrome/Spartan and Mozilla Web apps. 

CyanogenMod may need a better name for wider audience, so they could mix Android and Windows to AndroWin for example :) With recent Microsoft open-sourcing of .NET, that may be possible. They the users could access 
  • Android apps from Google store and 
  • Windows apps from Microsoft store, and 
  • Web apps from many places. 
The name Androwin is already used for running Android apps on Windows desktop, but as Apple has demonstrated with iPhone (that was first trademarked by Cisco), getting name is not a significant issue. 

So the mix may be the best of all worlds. Or is it?
The world does not need more platforms and confusion.
It needs a common apps platform, and open apps marketplace for developers and users. 
That is where Microsoft could help. 
Like Xamarin, but simpler, free, and cloud based. 



cloud, containers: Windows Server 2016

What's next for Microsoft's Windows Server 2016 | ZDNet

Next Windows Server Getting More Cloud Optimized -- Redmondmag.com