Is Mesos DC/OS really a Data Center Operating System?
A walk through of DC/OS container cluster manager
Would it be possible for an entire datacenter to run on a single operating system? Generally, the role of an operating system is to provide access to hardware resources and system software for running software applications. Technically, DC/OS is a container cluster manager which provides a platform for deploying software applications on containers. More importantly, it can run on physical or virtual machines by abstracting out underlying infrastructure from the application layer. DC/OS can be installed on any datacenter on hundreds and thousands of machines, and act as an operating system for its applications. Due to these reasons, DC/OS is considered as a datacenter operating system.
Nevertheless, at a glance, it may sound more like a marketing term than what it actually offers. DC/OS is very much similar to other container cluster managers such as Kubernetes and Docker Swarm. Those systems provide almost the same set of features as DC/OS. However, there is a clear difference between DC/OS and other container cluster managers on deploying Big Data and Analytics solutions. That’s with its ability to extend the scheduler for providing dedicated container scheduling capabilities. For an example systems such as Apache Spark, Apache Storm, Hadoop, Cassandra have implemented Mesos…
