Google brings robust cluster scheduling to its cloud

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.
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First developed by the University of California, Berkeley, Mesos can be thought of as an operating system that allows an administrator to control an entire cluster of computers, or even an entire data center, as if it were a single machine.

Thanks to its fine-tuned scheduling capabilities, Mesos can allow multiple frameworks, such as Hadoop or Spark, to share a single cluster, as well as allow multiple copies of the same framework to run on a single cluster.

The software also has built-in resiliency: If one or several nodes stop working, the software can automatically move that work to other, operational nodes in that cluster.

Twitter, Airbnb, Netflix and Hubspot have all used Mesos to coordinate operations.

Google has modified its new software for managing Docker containers, called Kubernetes, so it can run on Mesos, work Google also announced Monday.

Google has been an ardent user of Docker internally, using more than 2 billion containers a week in its routine operations. The open-source Docker provides a container-based virtualization, which is an alternative to traditional virtualization workloads now being considered by many organizations, due to its putative performance superiority.

Now, Google customers can use Mesosphere cluster to run Docker containers and use any leftover capabilities to run other framework-based workloads.

“You’ll be able to create these modern distributed systems the way that Google does, and you’ll be able to run them side-by-side with all your existing applications,” said Craig McLuckie, Google Cloud Platform product manager.

Users can also move their workloads to any cloud provider that runs Mesos, eliminating the dependencies that can come with writing the applications to run on a specific cloud service, be that Google’s or some other vendor’s.

Google’s Mesosphere cluster package also includes the Apache Zookeeper configuration software, the Marathon scheduling software, as well as OpenVPN for logging into the cluster.

Use of Mesosphere on the Google Cloud Platform is not billed separately; it is included in the price of running a cluster.

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