Mesosphere, creators of the Datacenter Operating System (DCOS) for managing cloud and datacenter resources at scale, today announced the launch of a Developer Program with a software development kit (SDK) and certification program for developers building distributed services for the new datacenter form factor. Full program details and enrollment details may be found at: https://mesosphere.com/developer-program

Empowering the Modern “Datacenter Developer”
Mesosphere is driving an emerging class of applications which are built from the start to run at full datacenter scale. These distributed systems, such as Hadoop, Kafka, Kubernetes, Spark and YARN are designed to scale across multiple servers — they need to be highly automated, elastic and scalable because they are driving today’s big data, web- and mobile-backends, and IoT applications at scale.

The demand for large-scale distributed systems is giving rise to a new type of mainstream developer — the datacenter developer — which has parallels with the rise of mobile developers around the iOS and Android operating systems. The new class of datacenter developer builds applications and services that for reasons of size and complexity have outgrown the “per server” static partitioning approach of the legacy datacenter stack.

Historically, developers had to build create distributed systems from scratch. Today, with the Mesosphere DCOS, developers can build directly for datacenter and cloud scale using DCOS primitives for networking, resource allocation, container orchestration, fault tolerance, package distribution and automated operation.

The Mesosphere developer program and SDK is designed to help developers leverage the Apache Mesos distributed systems kernel that was born at UC Berkeley’s AMPlab. Mesos brings a resource scheduling model and “common services” (like any operating system kernel) that are specific to application resource consumption across multiple servers. Mesos powers some of the web’s most highly trafficked Web and mobile applications like Twitter, Yelp, Airbnb, Groupon and Apple’s Siri, among others.

“Today’s enterprise applications are being driven by a new data center architecture found at companies like Facebook and Google. The new norm is a distributed computing environment defined by hyperscale server deployments, containerized workloads, and microservices provisioning,” said Peter Levine, partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Mesosphere’s DCOS is the first operating system built specifically for the new data center and we expect it to give rise to a new class of datacenter developer in the same manner that iOS created the mobile developer.”

An SDK for the Datacenter
The Mesosphere SDK and developer program make it possible for any developer to easily create services that are purpose-built to run at datacenter scale, tapping into the burgeoning community of enterprises deploying datacenter and cloud services built to run autonomously on very large numbers of machines with the Mesosphere DCOS.

By using the Mesosphere SDK, developers can take advantage of DCOS primitives for:

  • Sophisticated container and Docker scheduling – Use the SDK to call into the API for requesting and accepting resource offers, then execute tasks in a highly-parallel manner, executing them inside of containers, including Docker containers.
  • Elasticity – Use Mesosphere libraries and sample to code to bring high-elasticity to your service, allowing it to scale up and down on demand.
  • Scalability – Rely on the underlying Mesos primitives to support your service running on thousands of hosts.
  • High availability – Mesosphere libraries and sample code (the same code used in Marathon) provide the building blocks for a fault-tolerant and self-healing system with extremely high availability.
  • Portability – All DCOS services are completely portable. They can be deployed with no code changes to any cluster running DCOS, whether in a public cloud (e.g., Amazon, Google, Microsoft) or a private datacenter, virtualized or on bare metal, by virtue of being written against the DCOS API.
  • One-command deploy (on prem, on any major cloud) – The DCOS packaging system makes it easy to deploy any DCOS service with one-command simplicity. E.g., dcos package install {name of service} will deploy a service to any infrastructure with no code changes.
  • Ease of development – The DCOS primitives make it fast and easy to develop a highly-complex distributed system, saving months of development effort and tens of thousands of lines of code that would be required to build a highly-available, fault-tolerant, elastic and scalable system from scratch.
  • Multi-tenancy of services – DCOS pools and isolates multiple frameworks in a single cluster so your customer can easily try out your service on an existing resource pool, and run your service along others at higher utilization.

The SDK also includes:

  • Documentation: Tutorials, specifications, design guides, API documentation, and code samples
  • Reference Project: A comprehensive reference project (fully documented code) provides a template and guide to understand the inner workings of a Certified DCOS Service
  • Local Dev Environment: A lightweight DCOS development environment that can be easily set up on a desktop or laptop machine

All members of the Mesosphere Developer Program have access to Mesosphere’s developer support, including a custom Google Group for posting questions, answers, tips, tricks, comments and suggestions. Developer Program members also have access to a live Slack Channel where they can chat in real time with Mesosphere DCOS Service experts and other DCOS Service developers.

VIP Partners Program
Members of the Mesosphere Developer Program are able to apply for Mesosphere’s VIP Partners program. VIP Partners get additional benefits, including a Partner Manager, VIP Developer Support, Certification Assistance, Automated Distribution, and Co-Marketing, among other benefits.

The VIP Partners Program is built to support all of the key ecosystem participants:

  • Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) – ISVs use the Mesosphere Developer Program to adapt their applications and services to the DCOS. (For partner testimonials, please refer to the Supporting Quotes sheet, attached.)
  • Security / storage / networking / “software infrastructure” players – Infrastructure services play a large role in meeting enterprise demands for running large-scale datacenter and cloud operations.
  • Hardware providers – Makers of infrastructure hardware, from servers to microprocessors to networking equipment, will work with the Mesosphere Developer program to build adapters for the DCOS that expose their differentiated products and capabilities up through the software stack to the application and services developers.
  • Cloud providers – Through the Mesosphere Developers Program, cloud providers can build adaptors and extensions that help the DCOS and DCOS services run uniquely well on their cloud.
  • SI partners – System Integrators leverage the Mesosphere Developer Program and SDK to build custom DCOS services for customers, to

Cisco is an example of one of Mesosphere’s VIP Partners. “Cisco is working with Mesosphere to accelerate the next generation of cloud computing,” said Ken Owens, CTO of Cisco Cloud Services. “What’s so exciting about working with the Mesosphere DCOS is that it is the first actual operating system that exposes common services across thousands of machines for algorithmically allocating and deallocating resources. By offering an SDK, Mesosphere is making it possible for vendors at all layers of the enterprise stack to write to common services that will accelerate the pace of enterprise adoption of large scale distributed services.”

VIP Partners also get access to Mesosphere’s comprehensive certification program. This is a rigorous set of best-practice criteria, technical requirements and support guarantees that ensure enterprise can run a partner’s service in production and at scale. The certification process provides a trusted imprimatur to partner services, making it easier for buyers to purchase and implement in production.