Mesosphere launched the DC/OS project today, an open source effort aimed at helping companies adopt the advanced operational and architectural practices of the webscale giants without having to reinvent the wheel.

It will allow users to easily deploy a single platform for running modern applications on one set of shared resources, Mesosphere claims in a blog posting.

The open source group has a GitHub repository, and its code is being released under the Apache License 2.0, which allows users to download and use the software freely.

DC/OS derives primarily from Mesosphere’s Datacenter Operating System, a commercial product built around the Apache Mesos kernel. Making parts of the operating system available via open source was always part of the company's game plan, according to the blog.

Just a few weeks ago, Mesosphere announced a $73.5 million C round, including investments from Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

Today’s announcement says the open source project is backed by more than 60 partners, including Microsoft, HPE, Accenture, Autodesk, Cisco, EMC, Equinix, Puppet, and Verizon.

The group plans to explore different long-term stewardship options, including being overseen by a third party such as the Apache Software Foundation, the Linux Foundation, or the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Apache Mesos — the open source, distributed kernel — is at the core of DC/OS, and the project also includes Mesosphere’s native container-orchestration platform Marathon. In addition, it supports other container systems including Docker and Kubernetes.

But the announcement notes that modern software requires a lot more than just containers: "Today’s best applications are often built on distributed systems comprised of myriad individual services, storage engines and data-processing tools.”

Other features of DC/OS include:

  • App-store-like installation of complex distributed systems (including HDFS, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, and Apache Cassandra)
  • Significant simplification of data center management, by turning thousands of machines into a single logical computer
  • GUI-based monitoring and management
  • Standard user experience whether deployed on bare metal, virtual machines, or in the cloud
Microsoft and Mesosphere

Separately, Microsoft announced general availability of its Azure Container Service today, and DC/OS is "a key component" of it, according to a blog posting by John Gossman, architect of Microsoft Azure.

For its part, Mesosphere says it will still sell its Enterprise DC/OS product, which enhances the open source effort by offering key enterprise features around security, performance, networking, compliance, monitoring, and multi-team support that the DC/OS project does not include.