Mesosphere's DCOS, for managing Linux systems and applications at scale, takes on container-management duties, thanks to Google's Kubernetes Mesosphere, creator of DCOS — a management system for data centers that leverages the Apache Mesos cluster management project — is following in the footsteps of many other data center projects and becoming more container-conscious. It’s yet another sign of how containers, rather than VMs, bare-metal machines, or stand-alone applications, are becoming the standard unit of currency for servers and data centers alike. DCOS is meant to manage existing flotillas of Linux systems, whether running in a local infrastructure as VMs or bare metal or in the cloud. Mesosphere’s latest change to DCOS involves adding the Google-authored container-management framework Kubernetes as a fully supported component, allowing containerized applications to run. By default, DCOS uses Apache Mesos to schedule and launch applications across a data center’s hardware. Applications for DCOS, such as Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, or Cassandra, can be installed from an existing repository, run via simple command-line operations (“dcos spark run”), and automatically scaled to meet demand. With Kubernetes, containerized apps can also be launched and managed side by side along with those workloads. One advantage of DCOS: It manages existing Linux systems, rather than requiring rip-and-replace operation needed with other container-oriented systems at scale, such as CoreOS. Much of DCOS’s feature set is built around such expectations, emphasizing how workloads and apps are managed, rather than making arguments for changing the underlying OS (as with CoreOS or Joyent‘s Triton). Mesosphere and Google have been collaborating on Kubernetes for some time, with the first word surfacing back in August of last year. Then, too, Mesosphere talked up the advantages of being able to run apps managed both by Mesos and Kubernetes side by side on the same systems. Right now, Kubernetes on DCOS is only available via an early-access program, but access is free and requires only an email address. Technology IndustrySoftware DevelopmentOpen Source