This week we are very pleased to release version 0.8.0 of minimesos. This new release contains many improvements, bug fixesandnew features. The two most important features are that minimesos now ships withWeave Scope and HashiCorp's Consul. In this blog, I am going to focus on how important we think the integration with Scope is.
What is minimesos?
Minimesos is our testing and experimentation tool that allows developers to run Apache Mesos locally. Minimesos contains a number of great features, for example the minimesos file, which lets you version control and configure the cluster. Minimesos also ships with Apache Zookeeper, Mesosphere's Marathon, for scheduling, and, as of today, HashiCorp's Consul, which takes care of service discovery.
This set of tools and integrations means that developers can download minimesos and immediately start working on a tool stack that is otherwise notoriously difficult to get started with. The upside of this is that experimenting with cloud-native applications becomes very simple -no virtual machines, no cloud accounts.
As well as integrating a very useful stack, minimesos includes the minimesosFile and JUnit class rules. This means that minimesos can be used for local unit and system testing. Once application code is checked in, it can be picked up by the build server, which also has minimesos installed. The code can then be tested and integrated before finally being deployed to the cloud. Minismesos thus enables cloud-native development by enabling cloud-native continuous integration.
Why minimesos?
There are a two main of reasons for minimesos.
Minimesos and Weave Scope
Weave Scopeis an extremely useful tool that not only visualises the cluster but allows you to monitor it in a much more intuitive way than you can through the command line. Weave Scope also lets you drill down, from the web interface, into each container where you see vital metrics, such as CPU, memory and details of specific containers. Through the Scope controls, we can pause, stop or even restart containers. Finally, we can actually enter the container's shell and interact with it directly. All this is done through from the browser.
The power off connecting Weave Scope to minimesos cannot be overstated. Here are just a few of the use cases we have discovered:
Some Examples:
Image 1 -The minimesos cluster and an ElasticSearch and Kibana installation.
Image 2 -Drilling down into the Kibana node to inspect its key metrics.
Image 3 -Accessing a container's terminal via Scope's interface.
There is a great video from the team that shows the capabilities here.
Conclusion
We hope you enjoy minimesos and that it is useful for you. If not, please reach out on Twitter to@minimesosand let us know what you need. In the meantime, we are delighted with this current release, which with the addition of the truly excellentWeave Scopemeans that minimesos is maturing into a world class tool for developing cloud native applications. As we head towardsCisco Live!in July, we are additionally excited about the upcoming features, which will include integration with Weave DNS for automatic service discovery and integration with Docker Swarm.
Minimesos and these new features are just some examples of how Cisco are helping to drive cloud-native development. Check out other upcoming featureshere.