This may sound a bit like an older technology called virtualization, but tools like DC/OS and Kubernetes takes things much further. For one, they can run massive quantities of software far more efficiently than virtualization ever could. "The magic of the container world is that the computational overhead is far less than full virtualization," says Mike Stoppelman, the senior vice president of engineering at Yelp, which now runs its operation at DC/OS. "Even today, moving around a 20 megabyte container is so much easier than moving a 100 megabyte virtual image ... and the network traffic created by this stuff is an order of magnitude less."
But this also is about improving the lives of software engineers. Any company that hits 50 to 100 engineers, Stoppelman says, almost has to embrace this kind of container architecture. It must break down its software into tiny pieces that can by run across myriad machines. Otherwise, things get too unwieldy. Tools like DC/OS and Kubernetes make it far easier to build that kind of distributed software. And the importance of this should not be underestimated. After all, software that runs across dozens or even hundreds of machines---think Google and Twitter and Apple Siri---drives the modern world.
From Google to AirBnb to Yelp
The container revolution is quite real. Hindman redesigned Twitter's infrastructure alongside his old friend Florian Leibert, who helped bring the container idea to Airbnb. Now, they're both at Mesosphere, where they've helped pushe the idea into countless other companies, including Yelp, Netflix, Autodesk, and Apple. This really is Google's infrastructure spreading everywhere. Stoppelman, once a senior engineer at Google describes Yelp's new infrastructure as "very similar to Borg."
Stoppelman notes that Mesosphere developed an early lead in the new market, and Polvi says much the same thing. But Polvi also believes the market eventually will center on Kubernetes. His company offers an individual server operating system, CoreOS, that works with tools like Kubernetes, and he has worked closely with Google on the open source project. "I think things kinda converge on Kubernetes in due course," Polvi says. "Kubernetes nailed the interface---the API---for how you talk to these distributed systems."
That said, Mesophere's DC/OS is clearly an effort to narrow any gap. It seeks to expand Mesos into more than just a technology for hardcore engineers, into software that any business can use.
In the Clouds
Companies are also using such tools atop cloud computing services. Yelp runs much of its infrastructure, for instance, on the Amazon cloud. And this is where things can get confusing.
Cloud services rely on virtualization---they offer virtual machines where customers can run software without setting up physical machines---but containers still make sense when running atop virtual machines. You can still increase efficiency---if not quite as much---and more importantly, you can still improve life for coders.
One reason Mesosphere is opening sourcing DC/OS is that this makes it easier for companies to run the tool both atop outside cloud services and inside their own data centers. For instance, Microsoft (which is an investor in Mesophere) uses DC/OS to drive a kind of container service it offers atop its cloud, and now, if they so desire, business can their software atop both this service and a version of DC/OS running on their own machines. Google pushes the same idea. It offers Kubernetes as a cloud service, but since the tool is open source, you're also free to use Kubernetes in your own data center. "That's one of the great value propositions of open source," says Mark Russinovich, the chief technology officer of Microsoft Azure. "People get this portability."
Windows, Here We Come
Microsoft's involvement is interesting because containers grew out of the open source Linux operating system, a rival to its own Windows OS. At Google, Borg drove thousands of machines loaded with Linux. The same goes for Twitter and Airbnb and Yelp. Containers were designed for Linux, and DC/OS only works with Linux machines.
Yes, it's interesting that Microsoft is embracing a Linux technology, but that's just how the company operates nowadays. Much as Google realized that the age of cloud computing means it must freely share its data center technologies, Microsoft came to see it must embrace open source software atop its cloud. But Redmond also is trying to recreate the container idea for use with its own Windows operating system.
Microsoft has already built a version of Windows that juggles containers---it uses this to run servers across its own online empire---and as Russinnovich notes, the company is working with Mesosphere to build a version of DC/OS that works with Windows. It really is Google Infrastructure for Everyone Else---including everyone who runs Microsoft software.
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