Mesosphere Grabs $36M in Funding for Data Center OS Built on Apache Mesos

Mesosphere, the company offering a data center operating system (DCOS) built on the open source Apache Mesos project, has announced a new round of $36M in Series B funding along with the early release of its data center OS. New investor Khosla Ventures led the round, with additional investments from Andreessen Horowitz, Fuel Capital, SV Angel and others.

The B round brings Mesosphere's total funding to approximately $50 million and the company says it plans to accelerate investment in global growth. According to the company: "With a DCOS, developers and operators no longer need to focus on individual virtual or physical machines but can easily build and deploy applications and services that span entire datacenters. This DCOS approach to programmable datacenters -- managing datacenters and clouds at web scale -- has helped drive the success of Internet giants like Google and Twitter, as well as the hypergrowth of young companies like Airbnb and Hubspot."

"The industry needs a new type of operating system to optimize and automate the complex landscape inherent to the agile IT era: a growing fleet of distributed web, mobile, analytic server applications, operated as application-centric abstractions on commodity server and storage pools in dedicated datacenters and public clouds," said Vinod Khosla, Founder of Khosla Ventures and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, in a statement. "In this environment, existing virtualization or orchestration software are insufficient to deliver on the end goals: abstract complexity, optimize utilization, and simplify or eliminate human intervention in the face of dynamic failures, demand surges, constant provisioning and upgrades. Mesosphere has assembled a world-class team to deliver this software foundation that makes it as easy to run massive distributed server applications as it is to run an app on your smartphone or PC."

"Today's applications and services have outgrown single servers," added Florian Leibert, CEO and co-founder of Mesosphere. "The datacenter needs an operating system. The Mesosphere DCOS automates common operations and makes your entire datacenter programmable. We want to give developers the power of the underlying resources without forcing them to worry about the complexity of managing hundreds or even thousands of machines. We are making modern, distributed systems as easy to build and operate as if they were running on a single machine." 

According to released details on the data center operating system:

 Mesosphere's DCOS, built on Apache Mesos, provides developers an API to automate allocation and deallocation of datacenter resources to run today's most popular distributed applications, like Apache Spark, Apache Cassandra and Google's Kubernetes (all natively supported by Mesosphere DCOS). A software development kit (SDK) aids quickly building applications that scale with built-in high availability and fault tolerance. The Mesosphere DCOS supports Linux applications and runs with Amazon AWS, Google GCE, Digital Ocean, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, VMware vCloud Air. The Mesosphere DCOS also runs on-premise on bare metal or on top of a virtualized private cloud, such as with VMware or OpenStack.

In June 2014, Mesosphere closed $10.5M in series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with additional investors Data Collective and Fuel Capital. In August, the company launched Mesosphere for Google Cloud Platform, bringing the power of Mesosphere and Google Kubernetes to the cloud.

Kubernetes and Apache Spark are both taking on enormous importance in data centers and in the cloud. If you haven't read up on these tools, we've covered them on OStatic here and here. 

You can find out much more bout Mesosphere's DCOS here.