Yesterday Docker announced to have acquired a semi-stealth startup called Conductant, focused on workloads orchestration.
Both Conductant’s founders, Bill Farner and David Chung, have significant enterprise experience coming from the technology provider space and their experience will be spent on a commercial distribution for Aurora and its integration with Docker Swarm.
Aurora is a popular extension of the Apache Mesos clustering system optimized for extremely large-scale production environments. It is widely recognized as the most scalable and operationally-robust component of the Mesos stack. Aurora is the perfect example of a powerful methodology which we call operations-driven development (ODD). The team at Conductant ran and operated some of the largest cloud environments in the world at Google, Twitter and Zynga. In the process of managing operations for these companies, they had to develop tools that no one else could build for them. This resonated with us because Docker itself is the fruit of our team’s experience operating large-scale cloud platforms. Bill Farner’s team at Twitter built Aurora to meet its own requirement: automate its massive server farms so that they could manage them with just a handful of experienced operations engineers. Very few tools available today have been battle-tested at such operational scale. There are many commercial distributions of Mesos, but none of them incorporate Aurora. We believe that is a wasted opportunity. We plan on incorporating the best ideas from Aurora into Docker Swarm, and are exploring integrating Aurora as an optional component of the official Docker stack.