Mesosphere's Data Center OS Comes to Azure and AWS

Mesosphere has launched a public beta of its Datacenter Operating System on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. DCOS treats the data center infrastructure like one big computer.

Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich gave a presentation during Microsoft Build in San Francisco earlier this week, demonstrating Mesosphere's data center OS on Azure in action, launching several hundred nodes and thousands of Docker containers from the console in quick fashion.

The same capability is now available on AWS as well. Mesosphere has also worked closely with Google and its Compute Platform for easy Mesosphere deployment. Developer cloud provider DigitalOcean also has added early Mesosphere support.

Mesosphere's data center OS is based on the open source Apache Mesos distributed systems kernel used by data center operators like Twitter, Airbnb, and Hubspot to power internet-scale applications. Apple recently disclosed it was using Mesos to power Siri's backend.

It helps with better data center resource utilization and better fault tolerance. It’s value is making it easier to launch applications like Hadoop and Cassandra across a cluster.

Mesosphere has expanded its value proposition beyond just Mesos, repackaging and re-marketing as DCOS. In addition to the Mesos core, DCOS also includes a set of core system services, including a distributed init system (Marathon), distributed cron (Chronos), service discovery (DNS), storage (HDFS), and others, all capable of launching containers at scale.

The data center OS also provides an API and software development kit that lets programmers develop for a data center like it’s one big computer.

The Microsoft demonstration positioned Mesosphere's utility in launching Docker containers at scale, something all the major clouds have been ensuring is possible on their offerings. Google added a Docker container management service to its cloud platform, and AWS did the same.

Microsoft introduced a Docker command line interface for Windows following a partnership with Docker last October. It recently launched Hyper-V Containers, a new hypervisor that runs containers safely on Windows Server and Microsoft Nano Server, a stripped-down, minimal-footprint Windows Server install option made for cloud and containers.