Mesosphere Inc., pioneer of the data center operating system approach to container orchestration, yesterday unveiled plans to kickstart what it calls the “Container 2.0” movement. The company has just struck alliances with a trio of enterprise Big Data vendors in order to take distributed app technology to the next level.

On Monday, Mesosphere announced partnerships with DataStax Inc., which leads the development of the Apache Cassandra NoSQL database, Confluent Inc., which develops an Apache Kafka-based platform, and Lightbend Inc., which created the popular Scala programming language.

Mesosphere says that Container 2.0 is a more efficient way to orchestrate stateless and stateful enterprise services from the same cloud or data center infrastructure.

“While Container 1.0 is a useful conversation starter and a great way to get people interested in building with containers, it’s actually of limited utility,” said Mesosphere’s CEO Florian Liebert in a blog post. “Companies only start seeing real, impactful business improvements when they move beyond individual containers and start operating with higher-level abstractions. In this 2.0 world, containers become an implementation detail, part of the solution.”

Liebert then laid out Mesosphere’s vision of a new breed of container-based apps and services that could be deployed as objects. Those apps could consist of up to hundreds of isolated containers running across databases and message queues. The biggest difference between Container 2.0 and earlier iterations of the technology is that IT teams can now deploy and scale containers “as a single, cohesive unit”, in the cloud or on-premises, Liebert said.

As for Mesosphere’s new partners, all three have said their offerings are now available to run on the latter’s Datacenter Operating System (DC/OS) platform. DataStax said its Cassandra-based platform is ideal for building and running distributed apps in the cloud, while also citing the growing demand among customers for the ability to schedule stateful workloads alongside stateless container workloads. It added that the ability to run different workloads in a single cluster greatly improves data center performance while also making it easier to manage capacity.

As for Confluent, it said its Kafka-based platform could be used in concert with DC/OS to run analytical tools, file systems and web servers. The team up would also help customers better run streaming processing apps using Kafka.

Last but not least, Lightbend said it was teaming up with Mesosphere to address the growing requirements needed to process data at near real-tinme, rather that an rest. The company said that by leveraging open-source platforms like Cassandra, Kafka, Mesos and Spark, “companies are well down the road toward modern containerized and data-driven applications, and now they’re looking for the right software to bring those apps from the lab and into production.”

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