Mesosphere Inc. has taken another step towards its goal of data center domination, launching a public beta of its Datacenter Operating System (DCOS) on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

The launches are a big step for the company, which has ambitions for its container-centric operating system to become the default option in the data center. DCOS allows developers to treat a data center with all of its various servers as a single entity. It’s based on the Apache Mesos cluster manager technology that’s already been deployed with great success at companies like Airbnb Inc. and Twitter Inc. The software is designed to automate common operations and pool compute resources, which makes it easier to run and manage massive distributed apps. The concept of DCOS is certainly novel, but it’s yet to be seen how much value it delivers.

DCOS’s biggest advantage is that developers can easily run Linux applications like Cassandra, Hadoop, Kubernetes or Jenkins on a cluster, while the OS automatically provisions server resources to scale up or down as necessary. The approach essentially unifies the data center into a single pool of shared resources for such apps, and does away with the need to rip-and-replace an old system, as other container-oriented systems like CoreOS require.

DCOS grew out of a project at Twitter that sought to solve scalability issues by consolidating multiple services like search from individual machines into large servers, explained Florian Leibert, cofounder and CEO of Mesosphere during an appearance on theCUBE last year.

“We saw that we could solve the resource problems and increase utilization by 2X to 3X,” Leibert said. “The whole virtualization space is being disrupted, and we think what’s needed is an aggregation model, not a virtualization model.”

Mesosphere’s mission therefore, is “to build the operating system that runs on your entire data center,” Leibert added.

Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich demonstrated how DCOS works on Azure at the BUILD developer conference earlier today, reported TechCrunch. In the demo he showed how simple it is to launch a cluster with 200 nodes on Azure, and then launched 2,000 Docker containers on top of that. AWS will also get the same kind of functionality.

Interested developers can sign up to access the public beta here.

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