Container software company Mesosphere Inc. is updating its popular DC/OS platform for building and running containerized applications, featuring a beta integration of the Kubernetes container orchestration platform.

The integration means that users can now install and scale up production-grade Kubernetes clusters on the DC/OS platform. This was possible before, but the DC/OS 1.10 release is the first version of the platform that offers an easy way to do so.

For background, Kubernetes is one of three popular orchestration or management systems used to run software containers. The other two are Docker Swarm Mode, which is built into Docker containers, and Marathon, which runs on Apache Mesos, the open-source project on which DC/OS is built.

All three container orchestration platform provide basic functionality such as provisioning, configuration and monitoring of clusters, but they differ in many areas. In the case of Kubernetes, it also offers additional features the others lack, such as a higher degree of interoperability, self-healing, automated rollouts and rollbacks, and storage orchestration.

“We’re committed to making DC/OS the best platform for modern applications, and that includes integration with the tools that developers and operators most want. Now, there is a lot of interest in Kubernetes so we are making that available in addition to Marathon,” said Tobi Knaup, co-founder and chief technology officer of Mesosphere.

Knaup said the new integration provides developers with new options for running stateless and stateful services. In addition, it allows them to decide which container orchestration service they wish to run as easily as they can choose between different data services and networking tools. As for infrastructure providers, they now have the ability to offer Kubernetes “as-a-service” together with other data services on shared DC/OS infrastructure.

“DC/OS enables you to pick the right tool for your requirements,” Knaup added. “Each orchestrator is better suited for different use cases. Developers should be able to choose the one that works best for them.”

Knaup said Kubernetes is now only available on DC/OS in beta, with general availability expected by early next year. That delay will allow Mesosphere the time it needs to ensure the orchestrator runs smoothly on DC/OS and add additional features to Kubernetes to make it more useful to developers.

“While in beta, we’ll continue our extensive testing to certify that it is production-ready, while adding additional features,” Knaup said. “We have an array of features we are building into our Kubernetes deployment, including high availability, multi-version support, in-place upgrades, integrated networking and load balancing, enhanced security. We aim to make it generally available with the release of DC/OS 1.11 early next year.”

In addition to Kubernetes, the new DC/OS 1.10 release offers a pack of security enhancements, including custom certification authority integration. DC/OS also gains new upgrade capabilities that enable simpler data backup and restore for applications as well as live upgrades to data services. There’s also an enhanced services software development kit, which makes it easier to add services such as Apache Spark, Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka and others to the DC/OS catalog. Finally, Mesosphere said it’s added a more flexible and better-performing networking stack and edge load balancer that guarantees performance and isolation for applications and services.

Mesosphere said DC/OS 1.10 is available for download immediately, and provides additional instructions for integrating the Kubernetes beta on GitHub.

Image: Mesosphere