One of the pleasures of being a giant data processing company is the scale it gives for buying and creating new technologies. Service and content providers like Google, Twitter and others have found tremendous advantage in leveraging their size to harness the power of tens of thousands of servers through open source software.
Now  comes word that Google and a startup called Mesosphere — which makes a commercial version of the Apache Mesos framework for managing a data centre or cloud as a single resource — are working together for CIOs wanting to use infrastructure as a service (IaaS) on a large scale. All of an enterprises applications can draw on the pool of resources.
It’s another way in which Google is competing with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and IBM Softlayer for cloud customers.
Google and Mesosphere announced Monday a new app letting developers can spin up a Mesosphere cluster on Google Cloud Platform in just a few clicks. The app automatically installs and configures everything  needed, including the Mesos kernel, Apache Zookeeper (for maintaining configuration information) and Marathon (for deploying apps on large clusters), as well as OpenVPN for logging into a cluster. The result is
Google brings not only its Cloud Platform but also is letting Mesosphere incorporate its Kubernetes container management tool for the Linux Docker virtual containers into the startup’s solution.
There is no cost for using the app beyond the charges for running the configured instances on your Google Cloud Platform account.
As outlined in a blog today by co-founder and CEO Florian Leibert, Mesosphere creates a single, highly-elastic pool of resources from which all applications can draw, creating what he says are sophisticated clusters out of raw physical or virtual compute nodes. These Mesosphere clusters are highly available and support scheduling of diverse workloads on the same cluster, such as those from Marathon, Chronos, Hadoop, and Spark.
“Our combined compute fabric can run anywhere, whether on Google Cloud Platform, your own datacenter, or another cloud provider,” Leibert said. “You can schedule Docker containers side by side on the same Mesosphere cluster as other Linux workloads such as data analytics tasks like Spark and Hadoop and more traditional tasks like shell scripts and jar files.”
“Whether you are running massive, internet scale workloads like many of our customers, or you are just getting started, we think the combination of Mesos, Kubernetes, and Google Cloud Platform will help you build your apps faster, deploy them more efficiently, and run them with less overhead.”Â
The announcement caught the eye of Ben Kepes at Forbes.com. who said the partnership has many promises. Docker “is setting the world on fire,” he said. “It strikes me that we’re in a period where there will be massive flourishing of different initiatives .”
Frederic Lardinois at TechCrunch said he’s been told the idea is to let developers “operate at a new abstraction level that frees them from directly dealing with much of the infrastructure that powers their applications.”