Mesosphere added a new Kubernetes-focused option to its flagship DC/OS platform that simplifies container management across platforms and reduces costs for running high density Kubernetes clusters compared with Red Hat’s OpenShift.
The new offering is dubbed the Mesosphere Kubernetes Engine (MKE). It allows customers to run and manage Kubernetes in a multicloud environment. This includes on bare metal, in public or private clouds, and in virtualized environments.
Ed Hsu, vice president of product at Mesosphere, explained that this is becoming increasingly important for enterprises that rely on multicloud and on-premises infrastructure.
“This is a single, consolidated control plane for managing Kubernetes clusters,” Hsu said. “Our average customer has 15 or more clusters and at least 70 ways to run Kubernetes according to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. That is just becoming too much to manage.”
Chris Gaun, product manager at Mesosphere, said MKE is also targeted at the growing issue of “cluster sprawl.” Gaun described this as an organization having multiple container clusters now being spread across their infrastructure, with many of these clusters running just a handful of applications each.
“This is a common issue with config management,” Gaun said. “Developers will ask for a larger pool of resources than they will likely need so they don’t have to go back and ask for more. This results in a lot of nodes not being utilized efficiently.”
MKE also allows for support of multiple Kubernetes clusters within a shared environment inside of DC/OS. The previous iteration of DC/OS was limited to running just a single Kubernetes agent per DC/OS node.
“We wanted to take the strategic advantage of DC/OS and Mesos and run multiple infrastructure components on a single node,” Gaun said.
Mesosphere also provided a chart that showed a 90 percent cost savings in using the MKE platform to run three Kubernetes clusters each with 20 nodes compared with using Red Hat’s OpenShift.
More Kubernetes
Mesosphere’s DC/OS platform automates operations for container tools like Kubernetes, and data engineering and machine learning tools like TensorFlow, Apache Kafka, Cassandra, and Spark.
The company earlier this year added deeper Kubernetes integration and other enhancements focused on edge and multicloud support. That move followed its announcement last year to support Kubernetes alongside its own Marathon container orchestrator within DC/OS.
Mesosphere CTO Tobi Knaup at that time said the move to add Kubernetes support was about offering its customers more choices in terms of their container orchestration needs.
“It’s important for us to understand our target customers are usually the operations teams,” Knaup said. “These folks offer platforms for all the developers at a company, sometimes serving up to 10,000 developers. They use a variety of software and can’t be limited to one option. Choice is very important.”
Mesosphere in May closed on a $125 million Series D funding round that more than doubled what it raised in its four previous rounds combined. Mesosphere CEO Florian Leibert said the company plans to use the funds to target new markets around the world and new market opportunities like IoT.
Kubernetes Competition
Mesosphere competes against a number of companies, but has pointedly targeted its efforts at rivals like Red Hat and Pivotal.
Red Hat recently spent $250 million to acquire container platform provider CoreOS. It has since used that acquisition to bolster its OpenShift Container Platform.
Meanwhile, Pivotal earlier this year scored $555 million through an initial public offering (IPO). It recently updated its Pivotal Container Service (PKS) with deeper integration of VMware’s management tools.