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Free Mesosphere Datacenter OS on AWS Exclusively

• By David Ramel
• 06/10/2015

Cloud computing startup Mesosphere Inc. announced the general availability of its Datacenter Operating System (DCOS), of which a free community edition is available only on the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud for now.

DCOS, based on the open source Apache Mesos project, treats an entire datacenter's infrastructure as a new form factor, going a step beyond the traditional mobile device, laptop and server. It pools together all available resources, such as memory, CPU and storage, from multiple distributed servers -- be they physical, virtual or cloud-based -- to deploy and manage apps or workloads of all types, with an emphasis on container technologies such as Docker.

It supports dozens of services, working with distributed systems used in Big Data analytics such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, along with NoSQL (or NewSQL) databases like Cassandra and MemSQL and orchestration tools like Mesophere's own Marathon or Kubernetes, running cloud-native applications.

After a public beta program hosted on the AWS and Microsoft Azure clouds, the San Francisco-based Mesosphere yesterday announced general availability of a DCOS Enterprise Edition and a free cloud-only Community Edition now available only on AWS (coming this summer to Azure and the Google Cloud Platform). AWS yesterday published a blog post explaining how to use DCOS.

"Mesosphere DCOS and AWS are a natural fit: DCOS eases the administrative tasks inherent in managing fleets of containers or complex cluster-enabled services, but it still relies on properly managed compute and networking building blocks like those provided by AWS," company exec Michael Ruiz said in the blog post. "By extending on-premises clusters or building entirely new installations on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), you can take advantage of regional diversity for high availability (HA), robust networking described as code, Auto Scaling, elastic compute capacity, and other core features of the AWS platform."

The Enterprise Edition, available with a paid license that provides extra features, support and services, can be installed in a private, on-premises datacenter running on bare-metal or virtualized Linux servers, on any public cloud or in hybrid configurations spanning both scenarios.

"The Mesosphere DCOS, built around the Apache Mesos distributed systems kernel, is the first OS that spans hundreds or thousands of machines in a datacenter and delivers common services to operators, developers and data scientists," Mesosphere said in a statement. "The Mesos kernel abstracts away the underlying infrastructure and provides APIs for resource management and scheduling across large-scale datacenter and cloud environments."

Here's a video with more information: