Mesosphere Raises Hefty $73.5 Million, with Microsoft and HP On Board

For quite some time now, we've been covering Mesosphere and its Data Center Operating System (DCOS), focused on managing datacenters and clouds at web scale. Now, the company has a fresh infusion of cash and some heavy-hitting backers. The company announced announced a $73.5 million funding round. Hewlett Packard Enterprise led the round, with participation from Microsoft.

Mesosphere has built its Data Center Operating System on Apache Mesos,  and has announced the 1.0 release of Marathon open source software for managing containers on top of Mesos. The company also announced the launch of software called Velocity for continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). These tools let developers deploy new software builds on servers. Velocity is based on Marathon and integrates with the Jenkins CI tool.

Also participating in the latest funding round are previous Mesosphere investors Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and Fuel Capital, as well as new investors A Capital and Triangle Peak Partners. 

"We're experiencing an exciting new era in the enterprise datacenter, and Mesosphere is leading the charge," said Lak Ananth, Managing Director at Hewlett Packard Ventures. "Mesosphere's DCOS is the most exciting new enterprise operating system since Linux, and Hewlett Packard Ventures is excited to partner with them to support their rapid growth."

"Mesosphere is at the center of three of the biggest tech trends today -- cloud, containerization, and microservices," said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Microsoft's Cloud + Enterprise division. "Mesosphere's DCOS is preferred by our enterprise customers given the maturity of the container orchestration solution, and that's why we chose it as a key component for bringing containers to our enterprise-grade Microsoft Azure cloud platform."

According to an announcement:

Mesosphere makes it simple for enterprises to build, install, manage and scale today's must-have technologies, including Docker, Apache Cassandra, Jenkins, Apache Kafka and Apache Spark. Mesosphere's DCOS and the open source technologies that comprise it (including Apache Mesos and Marathon) are proven foundations for building microservices-based applications, running big data systems and operating massive production container environments. The new products announced today further Mesosphere's lead as the most production-proven platform for running modern applications.

Enterprises use the Mesosphere DCOS in production and at massive scale in some of the world's largest private datacenters, including at Verizon. Customers can take advantage of DCOS in public cloud environments, as well. It can run on cloud instances just like it does on bare metal, and is a key component of Microsoft's Azure Container Service.

 We previously interviewed the company's Ben Hindman who said the following:

 "Humans will always have a role in the datacenter, but things should be more automated with common services. Automation enables us to be smarter about scheduling and resource allocation, helping us drive up utilization (which drives down costs) and better handle machine and hardware failures.

Higher utilization is a key advantage of a datacenter operating system. If you’re in the cloud, you might be buying 8 core machines but only using 2 cores. Your cloud provider is really the one benefiting from virtualized resources, not you! The datacenter operating system enables you to more fully utilize your machines by automating the placement of your applications across your machines, using as many resources as it can per machine.

Dealing with failures gets much easier with a datacenter operating system too. When you are running 2-3 machines dealing with failures is a pain, but you can usually track down and fix any issues within a small amount of time. But when you begin to scale to tens, then hundreds, then thousands of machines, dealing with failures becomes an expensive manual operation.

Finally, a datacenter operating system enables developers, who traditionally have had to  interface with humans for access to machines, to develop and run their applications directly against datacenter resources via an API. Whether they’re claiming resources for existing applications or building new frameworks, the abstraction layer of the datacenter operating system makes it easier to build applications and share those applications across organizations."