Users of Mesosphere’s DC/OS Enterprise offering can now set up policy-driven storage to help with the storage orchestration for their distributed stateful applications.

The foundation of the new feature is DC/OS Storage Service, which keeps track of the state of storage options available in a DC/OS cluster and acts on user requests. It also converts Mesos RAW disk resources to MOUNT or BLOCK disk resources, which can be offered to other frameworks in a cluster. 

DC/OS Storage Service is supposed to give a hand at managing volumes, their profiles, volume providers, and other storage devices, making sure every workload is automatically matched to the type of storage (SSD or HDD for example) it requires.

To make that happen, cluster operators have to build a catalog of scenario specific storage policies, describing for example what kind of storage is used for production data vs what is usually utilised for logging. Developers can then specify a fitting policy in their application definition, which DC/OS in turn uses to locate the resources necessary to schedule the workload.

Under the hood the DC/OS Storage Service uses the Container Storage Interface to realise functions such as storage provisioning and managing local storage for distributed applications.

DSS 1.0 just became generally available to Enterprise users and initially supports Marathon applications along with Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Hadoop Distributed File System, and dcos-monitoring frameworks. Limitations, such as the focus on local volume storage and the need for manual upgrades on the running service, and known issues are noted in the release statement.

Enterprise users should be able to install DSS via the DC/OS Catalog.