Benjamin Hindman Joins Mesosphere
Mesosphere today announced Benjamin Hindman, one of the original creators of Apache Mesos and a lead engineer on the Mesos project at Twitter, has joined the company. Hindman, who has been a close advisor to Mesosphere since its founding in 2013, will now lead the design of the distributed operating system the company is building. With $10.5M in series A financing announced earlier this summer, Mesosphere has assembled a team of elite distributed computing experts (most recently Stanford cloud systems researcher Christos Kozyrakis) to build a new kind of distributed operating system to manage resources across distributed systems in enterprise datacenters and clouds.
Hindman is joining Mesosphere to fulfill a vision he has had for years of building this new kind of distributed operating system using Mesos as the kernel. As an open source project, Mesos has had strong adoption at web-scale companies with vast engineering teams to build custom solutions with Mesos. The goal of Mesosphere is to build a distributed operating system that can be used by organizations of all sizes, from Fortune 500 companies to Silicon Valley startups.
"Today's applications -- not servers -- should be the first class citizens in our datacenters," said Hindman. "And to accomplish that we need a new kind of distributed operating system, one that operates at the scale of the datacenter and cloud and that makes launching and running distributed applications as easy as launching and running applications on a personal computer or mobile device."
Hindman is one of the creators of Apache Mesos, a distributed systems kernel born out of UC Berkeley's AMPLab that allows developers to program against the datacenter like it's a single computer. Mesos abstracts CPU, memory, storage and other compute resources away from servers and cloud instances, and creates a simpler and more scalable approach to resource management and scheduling across entire datacenter and cloud environments. For years, Twitter has run its critical infrastructure on top of Mesos, and at the recent MesosCon numerous other major brands (Hubspot, Airbnb, PayPal, Netflix, Ebay) described custom infrastructures they had created using Mesos primitives.
The vision of Mesosphere is to make the datacenter or cloud as easy to operate (and develop for) as a personal computer. Mesosphere easily enhances existing datacenters because it runs on top of the most popular server OS's and cloud / PaaS environments already in use by enterprises, including OpenStack, Redhat Linux, CoreOS, CentOS, Ubuntu, CoudFoundry, OpenShift and similar technologies.
"Web-scale is no longer just the problem of hypergrowth web companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook," said Florian Leibert, CEO and Co-Founder of Mesosphere. "Today's applications have outgrown single-server approaches, and deploying hundreds of containers across thousands of cloud or datacenter resources without a lot of human intervention or management is the new requirement for the enterprise CIO. Mesosphere is the answer and Ben Hindman is the visionary technologist who saw this when he was a PhD student at Berkeley and then made it a reality at Twitter."
In June, Mesosphere closed $10.5M in series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with additional investors Data Collective and Fuel Capital, to extend the power of Mesos open source to a broader market. In August, the company launched Mesosphere for Google Cloud Platform -- bringing the power of Mesos and Google Kubernetes to to the cloud, and making it easy for customers to run applications and containers at scale. Earlier this month, Mesosphere announced that leading Stanford cloud systems researcher Christos Kozyrakis had joined the team. And last week, Mesosphere announced the strategic acquisition of OrlyAtomics, to complement Mesosphere's distributed operating system design for high concurrency and speed of data access across highly distributed systems.
