Last week Mesosphere announced a number of strategic partnerships that comprise a comprehensive ecosystem and spearhead its initiative for what it calls Container 2.0. We take a look at what this means for the industry.

Mesosphere has a thing for names. Calling your company Mesosphere helps if you’re into middleware, calling your product Data Center Operating System (DC/OS) helps put what it does across, and Container 2.0 is a sure hit way to state Mesosphere sees itself as leading the way to the next generation in Containers.

But what exactly is Container 2.0, how do the strategic partnerships fit in the picture, how does this work, and what does it all mean for clients and vendors? In an effort to go beyond press releases and technical article jargon, we had a chat with Tobi Knaup, CTO at Mesosphere, and Patrick McFadin, Cassandra Evangelist at DataStax.

For the last couple of years, there has been a lot of discussion on the merits of Containers versus Virtual Machines (VMs). Even though containers are generally seen as more agile, better suited to cloud architectures such as microservices, and more performant than VMs, one of their major limitations has been the lack of support for stateful applications. So, simplistically put, Container 2.0 = Container + State.

For DC/OS, the support for state in container apps is manifested via the DataStax – Confluent – Lightbend stack. Datastax is the enterprise version of Apache Cassandra, while Confluent is the enterprise version of Apache Kafka, and LightBend is an open-source application development environment for DC/OS.

Read the full article on ZDNet