Data center owners running open source operating systems could get a security boost after a new collaboration between Mesosphereand etcd.

Software developer Mesosphere is re-engineering its data center operating system in order to cater for etcd, a system that keeps configurations consistent across all nodes in a server cluster. The system could complement Mesosphere’s own Apache Mesos-based open source software, which aggregates multiple server clusters and makes them appear and act as a single computer.

Together as one

etcd - created by San Francisco start up CoreOS - aims to give data center operators the web-scale qualities pioneered by data center leaders such as Google and Facebook. Mesosphere’s strategy is to allow smaller operators to enjoy the same economies that the larger-scale industry players have been able to create for themselves.

As CoreOS announced the first stable release of etcd, Mesosphere’s chief architect Benjamin Hindman promised that Apache Mesos and Mesosphere’s data center operating system will soon have a standard plugin to support etcd. Hindman said Mesosphere is responding to increasing demand from clients.

“Shared configuration and shared state are two very tricky domains for distributed systems developers as services no longer run on one machine but are coordinated across an entire data center,” said Hindman, who also acts as the chair of Apache Mesos project.

Mesosphere launched an early-access preview of its data center operating system in December and plans a public launch sometime in the first half of 2015.

The new plugin will give data centers greater reliability since etcd patches up one of the weaknesses of the current operating system, where a failure in a single node can bring down an entire cluster.

The etcd software is used in Google’s open source application-container management system Kubernetes and Pivotal’s open source Platform-as-a-Service technology Cloud Foundry.

Meanwhile Mesos is used by a data center luminaries such as Airbnb, Hubspot and Hindman’s old employer Twitter, where he developed software that would make its network’s infrastructure more resilient.