The Future Is Here: Hybrid, Edge and Multicloud Operations in the Enterprise is Strategic and Real
Today Mesosphere announced DC/OS 1.11, the latest release of its flagship software used by some of the largest, most sophisticated organizations in the world. This release focuses on three themes: seamless hybrid, edge and multicloud operations, production-ready Kubernetes and improved security for mission-critical stateful applications.
All of these themes are near and dear to my heart because we are addressing these needs with our own customers. Many of these customers are also Mesosphere DC/OS users like NIO the self-driving car company and Beco, an innovative IoT provider revolutionizing commercial real estate. But the demand for secure, hybrid and multicloud operations managed by Kubernetes is something we hear from almost all Portworx customers. This is why I think that Mesosphere’s latest release is so important. Hybrid, edge and multicloud operations aren’t just desirable for the enterprise, they are strategic. A recent experience highlighted this for me.
Representatives from Portworx recently attended a Washington, D.C. summit of CIOs from across the U.S. federal government and government-related agencies organized by Mayfield Fund, one of the leading venture capital firms in the world. The Treasury Department, Homeland Security, CIA, International Monetary Fund, Brookings Institution, InQTel and others were in attendance and we had a wide-ranging discussion on AI and machine learning, how to build a culture of innovation across the government and private sector and the possibilities enabled by a mass move to the cloud. On this last topic, there was not universal agreement that cloud is the most desired end state for the government, but some CIOs at the event, especially from the intelligence agencies were arguing persuasively for the benefits of the cloud from a cost, operational efficiency and agility perspective.
As it became clear that a majority of government CIOs were supportive of the move to the cloud, an undercurrent of caution emerged. Government agencies are extremely concerned about being locked into a single cloud provider. These are not theoretical concerns when you are talking about multibillion-dollar IT budgets and petabytes of data.
When we asked the audience who is investigating containers in their organization, 90 percent of the hands went up in the room. When asked why the answers were consistent: more agility and application portability. Application portability is one reason why Mesosphere’s latest release is so important.
Only if you can credibly run an application in multiple environments, will you truly have leverage with service providers. This is the point I made earlier that hybrid and multi-cloud operations aren’t just desirable for the enterprise, they are strategic. Being able to burst to the cloud to access additional compute is desirable. Being able to failover applications between data centers is desirable. But the ability to take a workload and move it between environments is also strategic because it limits the lock-in that an organization faces from its cloud provider. Organizations will get better support, better pricing and ultimately have a better experience if the cloud provider is competing for their business.
We’re proud to be a Mesosphere partner making hybrid, edge and multicloud operations of stateful services a reality for dozens of enterprises, not just tomorrow, but today. With Mesosphere DC/OS running Marathon or Kubernetes, customers can have true portability of applications between environments. For instance, with Mesosphere and Portworx:
- Stateful applications like Cassandra, Kafka, ElasticSearch, HDFS and more can be deployed across fault-domains, ensuring that if a server, rack, datacenter or even region is down, an application can keep running or be rescheduled to another host with an up-to-date copy of the data available.
- Big data, fast data, and machine learning workloads like TensorFlow can be burst to the cloud using Portworx CloudSnap feature which moves data between environments so that DC/OS can schedule compute jobs on demand.
- DC/OS Kubernetes-as-a-service users can take advantage of Portworx’s forced hyperconvergence of compute with data to ensure that their mission-critical, performance-sensitive data services always run with fast local storage, even when being rescheduled due to a server or network failure.
I’m excited about the latest DC/OS release and helping customers make hybrid and multicloud computing a reality. What about you?
Portworx sponsored this story. Mesosphere is a sponsor of The New Stack.
