Powerful Open Source cluster manager in use at Airbnb, Twitter, and the University of California, among others, for dynamic resource sharing across cluster applications
24 July 2013 --Forest Hill, MD-- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache Mesos has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.
Apache Mesos is a cluster manager that provides efficient resource isolation and sharing across distributed applications, or frameworks. It can run multiple frameworks, including Apache Hadoop, MPI, Hypertable, Jenkins, Storm, and Spark, as well as other applications and custom frameworks.
"It was our goal all along to see Mesos become a kernel of the infrastructure stack of the future," said Benjamin Hindman, Vice President of Apache Mesos. "The project’s graduation from the Apache Incubator is recognition that the software is mature and has brought together a diverse community to sustain it in the future."
Initially created at the University of California at Berkeley's AMPLab (the research center also responsible for the original development of Apache Spark) to manage resource sharing and isolation in data centers, Mesos acts as a layer of abstraction between applications and pools of servers. Mesos helps avoid the necessity of creating separate clusters to run individual frameworks and instead making it possible to optimize how jobs are executed across shared machines.
Whilst in the Apache Incubator, Mesos had four releases, and established an Open Source community according to The Apache Way of governance. Additional improvements to the project includes its flexibility to support several application framework languages, and scalability that has been production tested to thousands of nodes and simulated to tens of thousands of nodes and hundreds of frameworks.
Apache Mesos has proven to be reliable for use in production, and has already been adopted by several organizations for cluster management.
"Mesos is the cornerstone of our elastic compute infrastructure," explained Chris Fry, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Twitter. "It's how we build all our new services and is critical for Twitter's continued success at scale … one of the primary keys to our data infrastructure efficiency."
"We're using Mesos to manage cluster resources for most of our data infrastructure," said Brenden Matthews, Engineer at Airbnb and Apache Mesos Committer. "We run Chronos, Storm, and Hadoop on top of Mesos in order to process petabytes of data." (Chronos is an Airbnb-developed Mesos framework as a replacement for cron, and an example of how custom frameworks can be developed on Mesos to leverage its resource sharing).
"Community support for Apache Mesos is encouraging, particularly as more companies assess how they manage their clusters and look for more efficiency," added Hindman. "Now that we've graduated, we look forward to continuing to grow the number of Mesos adopters and fostering an ecosystem around the project."
Availability and Oversight
As with all Apache products, Apache Mesos software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache Mesos release notes, source code, documentation, and related resources are available at http://mesos.apache.org.
About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Apache Mesos", "Mesos", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
# # #