Mesosphere launches early-access program for its data center operating system

San Francisco startup Mesosphere today is starting to accept applications from organizations that want to try out its new data center operating system, a tool for intelligently running a range of technologies on available data center infrastructure.

Also today, Mesosphere is announcing that the Google-led Kubernetes open-source container-management technology is now completely integrated with Mesosphere’s operating system. Efforts to integrate Kubernetes with Mesosphere’s technology — particularly the underlying Apache Mesos open-source cluster management tool — began last year.

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Mesosphere’s concept — an operating system not just for a server but for all the servers in a data center, or even those a company is using in a public cloud — is novel. The startup first talked about its vision for the operating system four months ago. Now it will be up to companies to determine its value.

A free “community” version of the operating system will be introduced in partnership with cloud providers, while a premium enterprise edition will also become available, Matt Trifiro, Mesosphere’s senior vice president of marketing and business development, told VentureBeat in an email.

Last year Google allied with Mesosphere to make it easy to run Mesosphere’s software on top of the Google Cloud Platform. Now Mesosphere will provide commercial support for an “Enterprise” version of Kubernetes, a technology that Google released under an open-source license last year, as part of the startup’s full operating system, according to a statement from Mesosphere today.

“Today’s announcement extends the reach of Kubernetes to a new class of users, and add some exciting new capabilities for everyone,” as Google product manager Craig McLuckie put it in his own blog post on the news.

Meanwhile, last week startup CoreOS announced a platform of software that includes Kubernetes. And Docker, whose Linux container technology — a substitute for virtual machines — arrived before Google released Kubernetes, has also been on board with the Kubernetes project.

But Mesosphere’s operating system goes beyond Kubernetes; it can also set up and monitor the health of big data systems like Hadoop and Spark, and databases like Cassandra, for instance.

Mesosphere announced a $36 million funding round in December.