The Azure Container Service from Microsoft is now generally available for deploying and scheduling cloud-based containers after emerging in preview in December 2015. Built on “100% open source software to maximize portability of workloads,” the Azure Container Service offers a choice of Mesosphere’s Data Center Operating System (DC/OS) or Docker Swarm for container orchestration. The Azure Container Service allows customers to deploy and manage cloud-based containers at scale in ways that are optimized for the Azure cloud but concomitantly enable portability across any infrastructure that supports Mesosphere or Docker Swarm. The platform refrains from prescribing a specific orchestration framework for a customer’s various use cases and workloads and currently does not support the Google’s Kubernetes container management infrastructure. Today’s news tightens the partnership between Microsoft and Mesosphere, the latter of which just announced its decision to open source its DC/OS software in collaboration with over 60 partners including Microsoft. Meanwhile, the Azure Container Service continues to testify to Microsoft’s transformation under Satya Nadella as evinced by its embrace of open source technologies such as Docker and DC/OS and a broader vision about the place of open source technologies in contemporary cloud computing per its November 2015 selection of Red Hat at the preferred vendor for enterprise Linux on Azure.
Category: Mesosphere
Mesosphere Closes $73.5M In Series C Funding
On Thursday, Mesosphere announced the finalization of $73.5M in Series C funding led by strategic investor Hewlett Packard Enterprise with additional participation from Microsoft, a new strategic investor, in conjunction with previous investors Andreessen Horowitz, Fuel Capital, Khosla Ventures, and new investors A Capital and Triangle Peak Partners. Mesosphere’s Data Center Operating System (DCOS) helps companies manage hyper-scale data centers as if they were one unit in addition to facilitating the operationalization of distributed applications, containers, micro-services and Big Data within cloud-based and on-premise environments. The San Francisco-based startup boasts customers such as Microsoft, HP, Yelp and eBay and currently staffs approximately 125 employees. The funding raise will be used to enhance its engineering operations in addition to expanding its sales and support teams. Microsoft and HPE remain likely acquirers of Mesosphere, particularly given Mesosphere’s collaboration with Microsoft on the Azure Container Service and Mesosphere’s partnership with HPE to leverage HPE hardware. The biggest news from today’s funding announcement is Microsoft’s participation as a new strategic investor, which corroborates reports that Microsoft attempted to purchase Mesosphere last year for approximately $150M. The $73.5M in Series C funding round brings the total capital raised by Mesosphere to $126M. In addition to the funding raise, Mesosphere today announced the release of Marathon 1.0, an enterprise-grade orchestration platform and a new product, Velocity, a continuous improvement and continuous development tool for its DCOS that uses the open source Jenkins framework.
DigitalOcean Partners With Mesosphere To Improve Infrastructure Scalability, Fault Tolerance and Performance
DigitalOcean recently announced a partnership with Mesosphere that will bring Apache Mesos technology to DigitalOcean’s SSD cloud servers. Mesosphere, a San Francisco-based startup, commercializes Apache Mesos technology that enables organizations to manage datacenters as if they are one unit instead of an ecosystem of disparate infrastructure and networking components. Apache Mesos leverages a distributed systems kernel that allows developers to abstract CPU, memory, storage and other compute resources into a single pool that delivers improvements in fault tolerance, scalability, performance and operational simplicity. DigitalOcean customers can now launch Mesosphere from a landing page that enables the provisioning of a Mesosphere cluster. As a result, developers can benefit from the economies of scale specific to Mesosphere technology and subsequently manage thousands of DigitalOcean droplets as if they belong to one entity. DigitalOcean customers interested in using Mesosphere technology can choose from either a development (four instances of 2GB droplets) option, a high availability option (12 instances of 2GB droplets) and a custom installation option. Moreover, the streamlined provisioning process allows customers to take advantage of Mesosphere to manage their virtual private server “droplets” in minutes without struggling through an arduous and complex installation process. The partnership between DigitalOcean and Mesosphere illustrates the increasing prevalence of Apache Mesos as a breakthrough technology for delivering the scalability and performance enjoyed by internet giants such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo to enterprise customers interested in a similar degree of operational simplicity and performance for their own IaaS infrastructures.
Mesosphere Raises $10.5M In Series A Funding To Manage Datacenter As One Machine
Mesosphere finalized $10.5M in Series A funding on Monday in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The San Francisco-based startup intends to commercialize Apache Mesos technology to help enterprises experience the datacenter-related economies of scale enjoyed by handful of internet giants such as Twitter, Netflix and eBay. Apache Mesos enables organizations to manage datacenters as if they are a single machine as opposed to a veritable ecosystem of computing, storage, networking and application components. Mesos technology aggregates datacenter resources and automates the processes required for day to day management of IT operations. Apache Mesos uses containerizer technology to “provide an environment for each executor and its tasks to run in” for purposes of “resource isolation” in contradistinction to containerization, which represents a “general concept that can encompass such things as packaging.” By encapsulating a datacenter within the rubric of one entity using Mesos technology, enterprises can enjoy improvements in resource utilization, fault tolerance, scalability, performance and simplicity of management. Brad Silverberg, co-founder of Fuel Capital, which also participated in the Series A funding raise, described the concept of managing a datacenter as one machine as “the holy grail of cloud computing” that had yet to be delivered successfully by any technology with the exception of Apache Mesos. Organizations that currently use Mesos technology include AirBnB, HubSpot, eBay, Netflix, OpenTable, PayPal and Twitter. Today’s funding raise also featured the participation of Data Collective in addition to Andreessen Horowitz and Fuel Capital.
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