Cloud-native experts Mesosphere have dropped their familiar company name in favour of new moniker D2iQ, committing to day two operations and making their Kubernetes and data-related offerings more visible.

Mesosphere was founded by Benjamin Hindman, Tobias Knaup, and Florian Leibert back in 2013. Before that, they had roles at Twitter (Hindman, Leibert) and Airbnb (Knaup,Leibert). Hindman is one of the creators of cluster manager Apache Mesos, which serves as the basis for Mesosphere’s DC/OS. Meanwhile Leibert and Knaup received attention for their container orchestration platform Marathon, which also makes use of Mesos and was developed further at Mesosphere.

However, since container orchestrator Kubernetes became more and more popular, the company extended their focus and started introducing K8s-related products such as Mesosphere Kubernetes Engine into their portfolio. The renaming can be seen as a way of making the internal shift more visible, or as CEO Mike Fey put it “Mesosphere doesn’t represent the evolution of our strategy and the services we have offered our customers for some time”.

D2iQ stands for Day-Two-I-Q and is meant to reflect the company’s goal of “helping our customers build, deploy and support cloud native, regardless of their preference of technology platform”. Day 2 references the phase in the software development lifecycle following the deployment of a project. This is when the daily business kicks in and operational aspects such as security, availability, observability and resilience start growing in importance, if they haven’t been a concern before.

Taking them into account early makes day 2 operations easier, which is where the second part of the name comes into play. Mesosphere aims at offering guidance to properly structure cloud native offerings from the get go, so IQ is deemed to signify the smarts of a forward looking approach.

Along with the name change goes a restructuring of the company’s offerings. Capabilities have been organised into spheres, probably as at tip to the hat to the old brand, which largely match the technologies D2iQ focuses on. The initial spheres are Ksphere, a Kubernetes-based offering, data-centric Datasphere, and Mesosphere. 

The latter is meant to offer customers a foundation for especially large-scale, reliable applications and makes use of Mesos and DC/OS. This should make sure users know the company is not stepping away from their foundations and will keep offering support for their former core products.

Ksphere presents end-2-end Kubernetes support (supporting services included), while Datasphere leverages projects such as Apache Kafka, Spark, and Cassandra to help customers build “data analytics, data science, and data-driven application environments”. More information on the new offerings is available upon request via the company’s contact form.