Linux and Windows Servers to Be Cogs in One Data Center OS Wheel

While Mesosphere may or may not become part of Microsoft – that anonymously sourced report hasn’t been denied or confirmed – the two companies are certainly working to blend their technologies.

This morning at MesosCon in Seattle, Microsoft unveiled an open source project that ports Apache Mesos, the heart of Mesosphere’s Datacenter Operating System, onto Windows Server. The end goal is to give developers and IT ops a single interface to deploy and manage applications in Docker containers across infrastructure that consists of both Linux and Windows servers.

Mesos on Windows Server is already available on the Mesos GitHub, although at the moment it’s a proof of concept, and the companies have invited other developers to take part in the open source project.

Since the majority of the world’s servers run either Windows or Linux, the project’s potential addressable audience is quite large. The idea is to enable the new generation of applications that consist of so-called “microservices” packaged in individual Docker containers, Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich explained in an interview posted on the Mesosphere blog.

Container-enabled microservice-oriented application development benefits a lot from the orchestration tools and cluster management made possible by Mesos and the data center OS that’s Mesosphere’s commercial version of the open source software born at University of California at Berkeley.

Mesos has been road-tested in some of the world’s largest-scale data center infrastructures, including, famously, Twitter’s and Apple’s, and Mesosphere’s aim is to take it to the enterprise. It abstracts disparate data center resources, be they cloud or on-prem VMs or physical servers, and presents them as a single pool of resources to the application, turning a data center or a cloud VM cluster into essentially a single computer. Hence the data center OS nomenclature.

Extending that pool of resources to include Windows would make for an even more all-encompassing data center OS, which is the aim of the new partnership announced today.

Earlier this week, a news report surfaced saying Microsoft was in buyout talks with Mesosphere, citing anonymous sources.