Mesosphere Transforms into D2iQ
Mesosphere this week renamed itself D2iQ as part of an effort to firmly re-establish is bona fides as a provider of tools for automating the deployment of a variety of open source platforms, including Kubernetes.
As part of that effort, the rebranded company launched three separate offerings, starting with a curated distribution of Kubernetes dubbed Konvoy. That platform provides the foundation for Ksphere, a suite of tools for automating both the deployment and ongoing management of Kubernetes that address everything from monitoring and logging to ingress control and disaster recovery via a single installer.
D2iQ also announced the upcoming release of Kommander, which provides a single pane of glass for lifecycle management, observability and configuration management for multi-cluster environments. An alpha version of Kommander is available immediately to users of Konvoy.
Those two products are intended to complement Kudo, a declarative tool for managing Kubernetes operations that Mesosphere previously launched.
The other two offerings include Datasphere, which automates the deployment and ongoing management of open source big data projects such as Kafka, Spark and Cassandra; and Mesosphere, which addresses the automation needs of companies that have embraced the open source Mesos project. Version 1.14 of DC/OS, which is based on Mesos, is expected to be generally available this fall.
D2iQ CTO Tobi Knaup says the company is not walking away from Mesos; rather, it’s aiming to expand its reach. Many of the automation tools and concepts that were developed for Mesosphere apply just as well to Kubernetes, he says.
The challenge enterprise IT organizations now face when confronted with hundreds of open source cloud-native projects is determining which elements of those projects are truly enterprise-grade. D2iQ, going forward, will launch additional automation frameworks to enable enterprise IT organizations to consume open source software with higher levels of confidence, says Knaup.
D2iQ is hardly the only vendor trying to operationalize open source software on behalf of enterprise IT organizations. The company undoubtedly will encounter fierce competition from rivals spanning IBM, which just completed its acquisition of Red Hat, to Rancher Labs. D2iQ has an advantage in having already proven it knows how to operationalize cloud-native technologies such as Mesos at scale. However, the momentum behind Kubernetes currently is much greater than Mesos. Even though Mesos may be more mature in some respects, the vendor community behind Kubernetes has made it clear they expect to quickly close any gaps between the two projects.
In the meantime, the momentum surrounding Kubernetes continues to grow. While a small percentage of enterprise IT applications are running on Kubernetes, most enterprise IT organizations now have a least one Kubernetes cluster up and running. As the number of Kubernetes clusters starts to increase, the complexity of managing those environments will increase as well. Kubernetes may be one of the most powerful platforms to come down the IT pike in memory, but it also exposes the many controls that the average IT administrator likely will find intimidating. In fact, lack of familiarity with Kubernetes operational process acts as drag on adoption.
It’s not clear to what degree IT operations teams will have to master Kubernetes as more automation frameworks become available. However, in the absence of those frameworks, inertia remains a powerful IT force to overcome.
