Container-orientated startup Mesosphere Inc. has gone and open-sourced its popular Data Center Operating System, known as DC/OS, in a move that’s been backed by tech giants like Cisco Systems Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), Microsoft and roughly 60 other partners.

Mesosphere, which is three-years old and headquartered in San Francisco, built DC/OS as an operating system that lets a data center’s entire range of services function as a single pool of resources. DC/OS has proven popular because, by doing so, it provides capabilities such as the rapid, app store-esque installation of over twenty complex distributed systems, such as Apache projects Cassandra, Kafka and Spark, HDFS, and others, the company said in a press release.

By making DC/OS open-source, companies of all sizes will be able to enjoy using the same computing infrastructure that tech giants like Apple, Google and Twitter already use, Mesosphere’s founder Benjamin Hindman told Computerworld.

All aboard the open-source train

More astute readers will be aware that many of Mesosphere’s technologies were already open-source, but by releasing DC/OS itself as an open project, it means that some of the firm’s proprietary tools, like its load balancer and GUI, are now available too.

Mesosphere is basically just following the trend set by much of the rest of the industry, which entails open-sourcing the basic platform and then trying to sell extra tools, services and support to go along with it. For example, Google open-sourced Kubernetes, its container management software, and has since witnessed a huge ecosystem grow up around it, including the Cloud Native Computing foundation that’s backed by companies like Docker Inc., Box Inc., Intel, Red Hat Inc. and Twitter, among others. Docker of course, has its own container management system for data centers, and has its own massive name recognition and ecosystem around its offerings.

As such, from Mesosphere’s perspective, the big advantage of today’s move is it gets to buddy up more closely to its new-found partners. While DC/OS targets different workloads from the above two examples, its vision converges with those of the latter. As such, all will need to differentiate themselves through the kinds of developer experiences and services they offer.

As such, it’s not a surprise to learn that the enterprise-grade version of Mesosphere’s DC/OS still comes with a few features not available in the open-source version. These include monitoring tools, enterprise security and compliance tool support, and advanced load balancing and networking features. Mesosphere also offers additional tools atop of DC/OS Enterprise like Infinity and Velocity as well.

The company hinted that by getting the likes of HPE and Microsoft on-board in a more formal partnership, it should be able to push development along a little faster.

“At Mesosphere, we are big believers in open source,” the company said. “Open source software helps its creators overcome the limitations of their own vision. Having a vibrant community of users, partners and contributors means we can continue to advance DC/OS as new requirements and use cases emerge.”

Microsoft beefs up its own container credentials

In related news, Microsoft yesterday made its Azure Container Service generally available.

Ross Gardler, Microsoft Azure senior program manager, explained in a blog post that Azure Container Service is designed to help organizations deploy and operate containerized application workloads on Microsoft’s cloud. The service works by providing simplified configurations of container orchestration technology that’s been optimized to run on its cloud. It’s built on 100 percent open-source software, and provides a choice of popular orchestration engines like DC/OS and Docker.

“We built Azure Container Service to be the fastest way to get the benefits of running containerized applications, using your choice of open source technology, tools and skills and with the support of a thriving community and ecosystem,” Gardler wrote.

The move comes after Microsoft, along with HPE, became a strategic investor in Mesosphere earlier this year. Last year, there were rumors that Microsoft was interested in acquiring Mesosphere outright for around $1 billion. That didn’t happen, and it may be that Microsoft has decided it’s best to let Mesosphere go it alone while maintaining especially close relations.

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