Datacenter Operating System
The Datacenter Operating System (known also as DC/OS) is an open source operating system and distributed system built upon the Apache Mesos project. The Datacenter Operating System was developed by software startup Mesosphere and open sourced in April 2016.
Origins
The term datacenter operating system was first coined in the paper The Datacenter Needs an Operating System, published at the University of California, Berkeley. In the paper Zaharia et al describe four areas of functionality that a datacenter OS should provide:
- Resource Sharing
- Data Sharing
- Programming Abstractions
- Debugging and Monitoring
The paper cites the Mesos project as an attempt to tackle the problem of resource sharing amongst frameworks on a shared compute cluster.
Architecture
The Datacenter Operating System categorizes components as being in user space or kernel space. Kernel space includes the Mesos master and agents while user space includes various system components of the Datacenter Operating System. These components include (amongst others):
- Admin Router, an internal load balancer
- CoSMoS, an internal packaging API service
- Exhibitor, a Java supervisor system for ZooKeeper
- Marathon, an Apache Mesos framework for container orchestration
- Mesos-DNS, an internal DNS service
History
On April 19, 2016, Mesosphere open sourced the Datacenter Operating System. At the launch, Autodesk announced that they were able to reduce running AWS instances by 66% using DC/OS.
See also
- Data center