Startup Mesosphere has delivered a public beta version of its much-anticipated datacenter operating system (DCOS) technology via a public beta period on two cloud platforms - Amazon Web Services (AWS) and or Microsoft Azure. 

The idea of DCOS is to provide a container-centric platform, which allows customers to treat all the servers and resources in a data centers as a single entity using what Mesosphere’s blog says will “eventually become the new standard for infrastructure management”. 

Kernel mustered

DCOS is based on the Apache Mesos technology, which acts as an OS kernel to treat an entire datacenter like a single computer with one pool of resources It uses Google’s Kubernetes container management technology, and OS services are provided by an array of leading open source projects including  Hadoop for big data, along with Cassandra, Jenkins and others.

Mesos is becoming more widely used in web-scale projects, at firms including Twitter, Yelp, eBay and NetFlix. Apple recently moved the backend for its Siri voice assistant across to Mesos.

Mesosphere describes DCOS as a hardened version of Mesos provided with a command line and a dashboard, making it “ridiculously easy” to deploy distributed services and build applications.

It uses a pre-installed open source framework called Marathon which Mesosphere says can get a platform-as-a-service environment up and running “n minutes”.

There’s no definite date for general availability, but Mesosphere is encouraging users to get stuck in and build real stuff: ”Maybe build the next Twitter, the next high-tech hedge fund or the next Siri. Or, hopefully, do something completely new and awesome.”

Azure is not just hosting this passively - TechCrunch reports that Azure CTO Mark Russinovich demonstrated the Mesosphere beta at Microsoft’s Build conference this week, starting a 200-node Mesosphere cluster on Azure, and then launching 2,000 Docker containers on top of it.  

The Mesosphere public beta is here!