Mesosphere Gets Big Funding Boost, Indicates Direction of Hyperscale Virtualization

            In a new round of funding the cloud-computing company Mesosphere received a 73.5 million dollar pay day mostly from the piggy banks of Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Mesosphere uses their Datacenter Operating System (DCOS) to run big data systems and large scale production container environments to service huge clients including Verizon and some of Microsoft's Azure Container Service. Mesosphere is on the forefront of containerization, cloud and and micro-services and this investment by two industry leaders only solidifies Mesosphere's growing position as a leader in big data and hyperscale virtualization.
        The most prominent element of the DCOS is the sophistication of its container organization technology. Containers are isolated guest virtual machines installed on top of a hardware node connected to an applications operating system. This process altogether is called container based virtualization and allows the virtual machines to run the operating system of the host without having the system completely installed (Rouse, 1). Container organization technology is important because more modern apps may require the deployment of multiple containers to run an application and the software provided by Mesosphere's DCOS allows enterprises to manage the deployment and grouping of all the containers.

          There are some disadvantages of the container-based service that Mesosphere provides one of which being the limited options for operating systems. Since guests do not need installed operating systems in container-based programs that means they are limited to only the operating system provided by the host. With that being said this disadvantage could also be viewed as a positive because the single operating system handling all hardware calls would improve overall performance (Rouse, 2).
          Mesosphere will only continue to grow between this massive injection of funding coupled with collaboration with its new backers. Thanks to this collaboration DCOS will be run on Linux and Windows Server in just a few months, also a 1.0 version of Marathon, Mesosphere's current container orchestration program, is expected to launch around the same time. This news is coupled with the announcement of Velocity, a prototype program for continuous integration and deployment only proves that Mesosphere will soon be more than just a small cloud computing startup. The growth of Mesosphere could be indicative of a potential trend in the direction of IT in that some enterprises will choose a container or cloud based product to run an operating system versus installing operating systems on their own personal hardware.

References

Noyes, Katherine. "Microsoft and HPE Throw Their Weight behind Mesosphere." ITNews. N.p., 24 Mar. 2016. Web. 29 Mar. 2016. <http://www.itnews.com/article/3048078/microsoft-and-hpe-throw-their-weight-behind-mesosphere.html>. (Main Article)

Rouse, Margaret. "What Is Container-based Virtualization (operating System-level Virtualization)? - Definition from WhatIs.com." SearchServerVirtualization. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/definition/container-based-virtualization-operating-system-level-virtualization>.

Sun, Lin. "Container Orchestration = Harmony for Born in the Cloud Applications - Bluemix Blog." Bluemix. N.p., 03 Nov. 2015. Web. 29 Mar. 2016. <https://developer.ibm.com/bluemix/2015/11/04/container-orchestration-harmony-for-born-in-the-cloud-applications/>.