Mesosphere Announces First Data Center OS and $36M in Funding

Spot on, and very well put.

The problem with existing orchestration tools, and tools like chef, puppet, etc. is that they're all a bit piecemeal and complicated. What we need is a step up the abstraction hierarchy, and some standardisation.

We'll probably know when we've got there if companies no longer have any real idea of how many servers or VMs from different providers that they're utilising. They'll just know which applications they're running and how much it's costing them.

But it's honestly not hard to hook all those machines up to a system like Chef/Puppet/Saltstack/Ansible and start automating common tasks within a few days.

Migrating databases between networks and rotating passwords would generally be outside of the scope of a tool like Mesosphere. Again, this is something that can be easily handled by existing automation tools. With most databases though, there's nothing straightforward about migrating data to nodes on different vlans or password rotations. If it's a one-time task, I recommend hiring a database consulting firm to do the migration or rotation.

I think that have good defaults and enforcing best-practices is a good idea. But I think that a lot of this can be achieved with existing tools. IMO, it makes more sense for organizations to automate and orchestrate Mesos deployments via existing/mature DevOps tools like Chef/Puppet/Ansible/Saltstack. Would also be exciting to see deployments working via NixOps/NixOS.

After reading the title I was a bit tempted to call BS since I think Kubernetes should have the rights to "The first Datacenter OS" tagline[1]. However, after reading up on the project details at https://mesosphere.com/learn I can see how Mesosphere came to the conclusion of being a DCOS, if not necessarily the first. Mesosphere goes a bit further than Kubernetes and offers a solution to the storage problem and attempts to address other "userland" concerns by shipping Apache Spark, Cassandra, Kafka, and Hadoop. So maybe it would be more accurate to call this a datacenter distro on top of the Kubernetes kernel?

Regardless, I think the concept of a datacenter OS will be the key to commoditizing IaaS providers and leveling the playing field in terms of features and usability for those who have not given up on the dream of running a "private" cloud.

Why will the DCOS work where others have failed?

Current solutions aimed at taming the datacenter operate at the machine/VM level, which exposes the OS for each machine, and completely punts on the application. Guess who gets to stitch it all back together? A DCOS is designed to manage applications directly, commonly via application containers, which means we can treat the OS running on the underlying machines like firmware and limit our interactions to basic updates and minimal configuration -- think CoreOS.

What about PaaS?

That's a topic worthy of a lengthy discussion, but I think it boils down to the lack of control found in most PaaS platforms[2]. In order for a PaaS offering to be successful it must make opinionated decisions about how to deploy and run applications; a bit too inflexible for most people. On the other hand, a DCOS seems to hit the sweet spot between IaaS and PaaS.

[1] I'm sure you can make an argument for Joyent's SmartDataCenter (https://www.joyent.com/private-cloud) as well. [2] Deis (http://deis.io/overview) attempts to address this issue.

They do.

E.g. SmartOS is a UNIX. It'd be pretty odd if it didn't have an init system. Or storage. Or cron. Or POSIX. Or whatever else you'd like to add to the list that UNIX systems usually have...