Benjamin Hindman
Benjamin Hindman is one of the creators of Apache Mesos and the chief architect at Mesosphere. Ben created Mesos as a PhD student at UC Berkeley before bringing it to Twitter, where it now runs on tens of thousands of machines powering Twitter's data centers. An academic at heart, his research in programming languages and distributed systems has been published in leading academic conferences.
Why the data center needs an operating system
It’s time for applications — not servers — to rule the data center.
Developers today are building a new class of applications. These applications no longer fit on a single server, but instead run across a fleet of servers in a data center. Examples include analytics frameworks like Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, message brokers like Apache Kafka, key-value stores like Apache Cassandra, as well as customer-facing applications such as those run by Twitter and Netflix.
These new applications are more than applications, they are distributed systems. Just as it became commonplace for developers to build multithreaded applications for single machines, it’s now becoming commonplace for developers to build distributed systems for data centers.
But it’s difficult for developers to build distributed systems, and it’s difficult for operators to run distributed systems. Why? Because we expose the wrong level of abstraction to both developers and operators: machines. Read more…