Until recently there were three major contenders for the spot as top cloud container orchestration program: Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesosphere. It’s now down to two. Mesosphere has thrown in the towel and is adopting Kubernetes into DC/OS.

Is this really a surrender? Mesosphere CEO Florian Leibert argues it’s not. His position is Mesosphere and Kubernetes have different use cases. You can use Mesosphere to run legacy applications without containers, while Kubernetes is all containers, all the time. Leibert said. “It’s like a layer cake. Kubernetes and Mesos can work really well together. Kubernetes takes over the container workflow but it can’t handle workflows that don’t run on containers such as Hadoop.”

Indeed, if you look at Mesosphere’s DC/OS history, in the beginning, DC/OS was meant to manage both “microservices running in containers and stateful big-data services.”

It’s not like Mesosphere is going away. It’s not. Instead of competing with clear market leader Kubernetes in orchestration — according to a September 2017 Redmonk report, 54 percent of Fortune 100 companies are running Kubernetes — Mesosphere is focusing on DC/OS. This is the company’s platform for building and running data-intensive applications.

It’s a real difference. At SUSECon in Prague, executives from both software development and Fortune 500 companies said they like DC/OS as a secure and resilient platform for running Big Data applications.

DC/OS, for example, works well with Big Data programs such as Apache Spark, Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka, Confluent Kafka, DataStax Enterprise, Elasticsearch, and the Hadoop Distributed File System.

Rhett Dillingham, senior cloud computing analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said in a statement that “DC/OS provides a cohesive platform making it easier to build, deploy, and dynamically scale modern applications. The addition of Kubernetes to DC/OS 1.10 brings two of the most popular open-source tools onto one platform for seamless deployment.”

So, what will Mesosphere be doing with Kubernetes? According to the company, Kubernetes will be a beta feature in the new release of DC/OS 1.10.

Specifically: “Development teams will be able to choose container orchestrators on DC/OS 1.10 as easily as they choose data services, CI/CD, or networking tools. Kubernetes on DC/OS will soon allow operators to easily install, scale and upgrade multiple production-grade Kubernetes clusters (even of different versions) on Mesosphere DC/OS. Infrastructure owners can now offer application developers Kubernetes for Docker container orchestration “as a service” alongside other data services or legacy applications, all on shared DC/OS infrastructure while maintaining high availability and isolation. All of these services running on DC/OS benefit from complete hybrid cloud portability on any infrastructure.”

So, if you like the idea of running Big Data applications and containerized programs on one platform, you shouldn’t see Mesosphere’s move as a retreat. Instead you should regard it as as an alliance of two best of breed software approaches to enable businesses to make the most of both.

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