Batteries Included, not Crippleware

At Cisco, we are continuously working with our Enterprise and Service Provider customers on the  many issues they are facing with the transition to Cloud Native and Hyperscale in the datacenter. What we have discovered is that with  this transition, administrators are struggling with the the increasing complexity in the data center, policy, and data management areas.

This complexity is primarily driven by not just the modern application development stack (containers, orchestration, etc) but also the data management platform needs, especially around analytics to drive business intelligence and machine learning. As a result of this complexity, lots of snowflakes are being created by the application development teams and this increased the complexity of the data center operations.

Cisco started working on an open source project called Mantl about 2 years ago.  Mantl is a batteries included end to end solution for your microservices infrastructure. Mantl’s ethos is to focus a community around an end to end solution, not around an individual component; designed to solve business and team challenges, one glue, improved by the community, tested everywhere. We have worked very closely with Mesosphere because Apache Mesos is a critical component of the modern application development model with the large ecosystem of frameworks that have been developed in the community.

We are very excited to be one of the 60+ innovative companies that are joining Mesosphere with the open-sourcing of DC/OS under ASL2.0 License announcement today. The evaluation of DC/OS has gone very well and we are excited to support this effort as Mantl and DC/OS make running containers in production easy.

Easy to Use

The installation and running of a production cluster is simple and well-documented. There are several “How-To” step by step guides provided for easy startup. We have discovered with Mantl that by getting the entire microservices architecture up and running quickly and glue-lessly,  developers can focus on their code which results in a continuous innovation and experimentation lifecycle. Additionally, with the flexibility and extensibility, there is no reason not to try new frameworks and services.

Solves Real Problems
This is not just about getting a cluster up and running with DC/OS, the result is something more tangible, where getting the cluster up and running is just the first step but not the last step. The goal here is to enable developers to focus on continuously producing code that produces business outcomes desired while enabling data center operators to reduce the complexity and improve the network, security, and policy governance for the business.  We have the following use cases today:

IoT: Manufacturing organizations are leveraging Mantl to enable fog computing with integrated data management to produce business outcomes.

Finance: Large banks are taking advantage of the microservice architecture Mantl enables to spread risk across multiple services and maintain high performance, quality, and enhanced security with the continuous deployment capabilities they are realizing.

Cloud Native Transformation: Mantl’s main use case today is enabling the cloud native transformation in the enterprise since it provides an end to end solution designed to solve business and team challenges in a cloud framework agnostic way.

Complete Solution
Cisco is excited to be part of the DC/OS launch as we have seen that together, Mantl with DC/OS provides everything you need, ready to run, out of the box. This isn’t crippleware. And because it is based on Mesos, it is battle-hardened. This is critical for the success of your business. Re-learning lessons that have already been learned by the community does you no good.

Stay tuned to DC/OS and Cisco Mantl as we approach Mesoscon and Dockercon to get access to early previews and more!