Mesosphere Inc., a startup that’s building a suite of open-source infrastructure tools based on the Apache Mesos project that enables data centers to be virtualized, has announced the availability of new programs and tools aimed at developers and possible partners. These include a new software development kit (SDK) and a Mesophere software developers program to go with it.

Mesosphere develops the Mesophere Data Center Operating System (DCOS) that enables admins to run services and apps across a cluster of machines located either on-premise or in the cloud. DCOS combines the Apache Mesos cluster manager with both open-source and proprietary components, allowing users to deploy and manager services through CLI tooling and a custom web UI.

With the new SDK, developers can now create apps for what Mesosphere terms the “data center form factor”. Meanwhile, the SDK will automatically scale these apps as required.

As Mesosphere pointed out in its blog post, it used to be that developers had to start from scratch when writing these kinds of apps for large-scale distributed systems. But that’s no longer the case, because “developers can build directly for datacenter and cloud scale using DCOS primitives for networking, resource allocation, container orchestration, fault tolerance, package distribution and automated operation,” the company said.

The SDK allows developers to write apps that automatically utilize Mesos’ capabilities. For example, the SDK provides the primitives needed for managing container scheduling, scaling up and down according to demand, and ensuring apps are highly available. Applications written for DCOS will be able to run wherever they’re deployed, be it on-premise or in the AWS or Azure cloud. The SDK is availabile for the Java, Scala, Python, Go and C++ programming languages, Mesosphere said.

“Think of distributed applications, like the next NoSQL database, the next machine-learning application, deep-learning trading applications – really anything that’s too big to run on a single machine,” Mesosphere CTO and co-founder Tobias Knaup told ZDnet. “We now enable these developers to build these systems very easily.”

Together with the SDK, Mesosphere is also launching a new developer program complete with a Google Group for the community, and also a Slack channels for real-time chats with other developers (including Mesosphere staff).

The developer program is open to anyone who’s interested, but there’s also a VIP partner program for ISVs and system integrators; security, storage, networking and infrastructure providers; as well as hardware and cloud providers. Those who join the VIP program will be able to access Mesosphere’s certification program that offers “a rigorous set of best-practice criteria, technical requirements and support guarantees that ensure enterprise can run a partner’s service in production and at scale.”

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