User Driven: The relentless march of open source into the data center

In another sign that enterprises are reaping the benefits of open source which web companies have enjoyed for years, Mesosphere is releasing major components of DC/OS under the same Apache 2.0 license as OpenStack.

This is welcome news, especially for OpenStack users who run Mesos on OpenStack today. One such user is Time Warner Cable, and I’ll be speaking with Tim Pletcher who runs TWC app platforms about their usage of Mesos + OpenStack next week at the Summit in Austin.

In a marked departure from previous enterprise technology shifts, users have a stronger voice relative to vendors this time around, and they are demanding open source over proprietary tools. One of the reasons is that they want the power to combine open source technologies to get more done. Just as the LAMP stack gave rise to Facebook, WordPress, Drupal and millions of other web applications, I believe we’re seeing the LAMP stack of the data center emerge that will provide equally massive benefits, if we all collaborate.

To identify this stack, we must first understand the real world patterns in the market. One of the most evident from my vantage point is the combination of application focused tools with OpenStack. Whether a container orchestration engine like Kubernetes, Mesos, or Docker Swarm, or a full fledged platform-as-a-service (PaaS) like Cloud Foundry, OpenShift, or Cloudify, users are finding the right combinations to meet their needs.

It’s our job to work across communities to help those users succeed, because our users expect OpenStack to act as an integration engine for these emerging technologies without reinventing the wheel. Sometimes in pursuit of this mission we encounter barriers.

One such barrier has been the licensing of DC/OS, which was discussed in a recent thread on the Openstack Foundation mailing list. An OpenStack user was asking the leader of the OpenStack Magnum project, which enables containers-as-a-service in an OpenStack native way, to integrate with DC/OS.

Now that major components of DC/OS have been open sourced, we can begin to look at the best ways to integrate the various components as a community to better serve our users.

I’ll be talking more about this topic in my keynote “Not Invented Here: Collaborate or Die in the Billion Device, Billion Core Era” next week, and in fact we have an entire track of container-focused talks.

We look forward to collaborating with the DC/OS community, and I hope to see you all in Austin!

Mark Collier is an OpenStack co-founder and currently OpenStack Foundation COO. You can find him on Twitter at @sparkycollier

Cover Photo // CC BY NC