Mesosphere announced the Data Center Operating System, or DCOS, alongside a series of funding that allowed the company to raise $36 million in investments.
Mesosphere is focusing on the commercialization of the open source Apache Mesos project, which is a platform for cluster management that allows users to manage distributed hardware resources as a single group of resources.
Mesos is used for both batches of tasks and services that run for long times, providing developers with an API that allows for the automation of the allocation and de-allocation of resources to operate distributed applications, including Apache Cassandra, Apache Spark and Kubernetes by Google.
The DCOS furthers these capabilities as it is able to pool resources and automate usual operations in datacenters. The operating system gives operators and developers the ability of creating an interface over several distributed resources for the easy allocation and removal of resources. Users are also provided with visual tools to allow them to understand the current operations of datacenters.
Based on the Apache Mesos, the DCOS includes several core system services, including Marathon, which is a distributed init systems, Chronos, which is a distributed cron, DNS, for service discovery, and HDFS, for storage.
DCOS also features a private and public repository that allows users to provide third-party and customized services for datacenters to businesses using a one-command installation procedure.
Also included in the DCOS is an SDK, so programmers will be able to develop applications and services against datacenter as if it is a single computer.
Alongside the announcement of DCOS, Mesosphere revealed a Series B funding round that raised $36 million. The funding round was led by Khosla Ventures, a new investor, with other investors including SV Angel, Andreessen Horowitz and Fuel Capital. With the new funding, total investments in Mesosphere has now reached $50 million
Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, tagged the DCOS as a major evolution in operating systems, saying that it is the first new major OS since Android was released in 2007.
With the DCOS, Mesosphere is looking to allow organizations to manage complex systems using a relatively simple control center, hiding most of the complexities that can be found in other multi-cloud management systems. This approach of a control system to work on several distributed services and infrastructures simultaneously is becoming more attractive to businesses, as their flexibility in delivering services is increased, as well as their ability to determine the best possible economics any time.
