Mesos Founding Father/Twitter Fail Whale Slayer Hindman Joins Mesosphere

Benjamin Hindman has joined Mesosphere in its quest to build the distributed operating system for managing data center and cloud resources at web scale. Hindman, who comes to Mesosphere after four years at Twitter, was one of the original creators of Apache Mesos, the popular open source server cluster management software Mesosphere built its business on.

Mesos lets organizations manage a mix of distributed infrastructure resources like a single machine. It has strong adoption at web-scale companies with significant engineering talent.

The cluster management software powers Twitter’s data centers and is widely credited for making appearances of the notorious Twitter Fail Whale a lot less frequent. Mesosphere’s goal is to bring the same capabilities to organizations of any size, offeing a variety of enterprise products based on the Mesos kernel, as well as commercial support.

"Today's applications -- not servers -- should be the first class citizens in our data centers," Hindman said. "And to accomplish that we need a new kind of distributed operating system, one that operates at the scale of the data center 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 will lead the design of the distributed operating system the company is building. He was previously a close advisor to the Mesosphere, going back to its founding last year.

Mesophere announced $10.5 million in funding this summer and has been assembling a team filled with distributed computing experts. Among other recent hires is Christos Kozyrakis associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University.

Mesos is a distributed systems kernel born out of UC Berkeley’s AMPLab about five years ago. Hindman was a PhD student at Berkeley at the time.

The software abstracts CPU, memory, storage and other compute resources on servers and cloud instances, enabling management of entire pools of resources as a single machine.

Mesosphere runs on top of the most popular server operating systems and cloud and Platform-as-a-Service environments already in use by enterprises, including OpenStack, Red Hat Linux, CoreOS, CentOS, Ubuntu, Coud Foundry, OpenShift and similar technologies.

"Web-scale is no longer just the problem of hyper-growth 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 data center 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."

Mesosphere is also collaborating with Google to bring the startup’s server cluster management software and Google’s open source Docker container management solution to the Google Cloud Platform.