Mesosphere taps Kubernetes for container orchestration

Mesosphere’s datacenter management platform, DC/OS, has added Kubernetes as an officially supported option for container orchestration.

DC/OS, built atop the Apache Mesos cluster-management project, has long offered Mesosphere’s own Marathon as its default orchestration system. But Kubernetes has outshone Marathon, thanks to a broad base of users and the seal of approval of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Mesosphere started to offer Kubernetes atop DC/OS as an option in 2015, but only by way of an early-access program. The current offering is still officially labeled a beta, but Mesosphere’s plans are to work “over the next few months” to general availability.

The edition of Kubernetes used for DC/OS, says Mesosphere, is the community mainline distribution, not a version customized for DC/OS. This, says Mesosphere, ensures a high degree of compatibility with Kubernetes apps and management tools: “You won’t be using kubectl for certain commands and then some other vendor-specific command line interfaces for others.”

Other features planned for Kubernetes in DC/OS echo the way Kubernetes is being supported on other platforms where it is a major ingredient. One such feature noted by Mesosphere is “non-disruptive, rolling upgrades” of Kubernetes—the ability to upgrade Kubernetes across a DC/OS installation without disrupting either applications or the operation of the cluster. CoreOS currently offers a similar feature for its distribution of Kubernetes, Tectonic.

Mesosphere has long distinguished DC/OS from other container-based OSes as a way to set up and manage complex infrastructure that isn’t easily encapsulated in a single container. Although Kubernetes provides a way to deploy multi-container apps by way of Helm charts, it’s unlikely Kubernetes will come to also encompass the infrastructure management features provided in DC/OS.