Oct 08, 2015
D2iQ
D2iQ
5 min read
The storage picture in Apache Mesos keeps getting prettier. The latest advance, which is the result of collaboration between Mesosphere and EMC's {code} team, means Mesos and the Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System (DCOS) can now support any block-based storage system that currently has a working Docker plugin. It's a list that includes EMC ScaleIO, Amazon Elastic Block Store, OpenStack Cinder and more.
This capability is possible because of two new projects, Docker Volume Driver Interface Isolation Module and Docker Volume Driver CLI, that allow Mesos agents and frameworks to tap into external storage systems. Among other things, users will be able to connect Mesos workloads to existing volumes, or create new volumes for their Mesos workloads by specifying the amount of storage and IOPS performance they require.
Here is a diagram of where the two new modules fit into the architecture of a Mesos-Docker environment:
Mesosphere is working on projects like this because storage management is crucially important to datacenter operations and ephemeral storage often is not good enough for mission-critical applications. In the case of Mesos and the DCOS, that means users need to be able to provision storage just like they do memory and CPU resources, and know that Mesos will be able to handle storage allocation and management just as intelligently.
Persistent direct-attached storage in Mesos .023 was a great start along this path—we're already building it into storage frameworks including HDFS, Cassandra, ArangoDB and Quobyte so Mesos can natively manage them—but it was just a start. Now, thanks to the team at EMC {code}, Mesos and DCOS users can easily connect Mesos with persistent network-attached storage. Soon, we expect an even richer set of options that will give Mesos and DCOS users a more native storage experience, as well as even more flexibility in terms of what storage systems they want to use and how they choose to manage them.
For now, though, you can dive into this early work with EMC {code} on GitHub. If you're at MesosCon Europe in Dublin, you track down members of either team and pick their brains about this project and what's next for storage management in Mesos and our Datacenter Operating System.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=104&v=Nngu8Gl0tqE[/embed]
