Rancher Labs and Vapor IO are announcing moves related to Apache Mesos, the open source container orchestration platform.

Rancher is adding Mesos support to its container management environment (also named Rancher), while Vapor IO is bringing its data center management software into Mesosphere's DC/OS.

The announcements are coming out Wednesday morning at MesosCon North America, being held in Denver.

Rancher already supports three types of container scheduling: Kubernetes, Docker Swarm from Docker Inc., and the startup's own Cattle.

The three are not exactly equivalent, says Shannon Williams, Rancher's vice president of sales and marketing. Mesos, which predates Docker's existence by a few years, handles more than just containers. "We see a lot of Mesos as a platform for running Hadoop jobs," he says.

For Rancher, the benefit to supporting multiple schedulers is that an enterprise can let different teams continue to work with their preferred types, according to Williams.

Of course, Rancher Labs is also being pragmatic. Container deployment is still new to the mainstream, and the competition among container management options is going to take time to play out. It's only practical for a platform such as Rancher to support as many popular options as possible.

Today's announcement means Rancher can automate the deployment of Mesos clusters and maintain access control for them. Setting up Mesos isn't necessarily easy, Williams says, so it's possible this could be an additional selling point for Rancher.

Vapor IO, meanwhile, is announcing that its Open Data Center Runtime Environment (OpenDCRE) is being integrated into Mesosphere's DC/OS to create a currency-based scheduler.

DCRE provides an API for monitoring the physical health of servers — metrics such as temperature or power consumption. DC/OS, Mesosphere's data center operating system, didn't previously get involved with those details; it's more about deploying applications and monitoring workloads.

The tandem targets enterprises that are using multiple clouds, including public cloud options such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). The idea is that OpenDCRE and DC/OS can help gauge the cost associated with workloads in each cloud, creating what Vapor IO is calling a currency-based scheduler.

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