Mesosphere, creators of the world’s first Datacenter Operating System (DCOS), today announced it has closed $73.5 million in a Series C funding round led by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) joining as a new strategic investor. The round brings Mesosphere’s total funding to date to nearly $126 million and supports the company’s accelerating growth as DCOS becomes the de facto standard for enterprises operating containers and distributed systems in production. Mesosphere also announced the version 1.0 release of Marathon, the container operations system for DCOS, and the new Mesosphere Velocity platform for improving developer agility via continuous integration and continuous deployment with the DCOS.

Also participating in this round are previous Mesosphere investors Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and Fuel Capital, as well as new investors A Capital and Triangle Peak Partners.

“We’re experiencing an exciting new era in the enterprise datacenter, and Mesosphere is leading the charge,” said Lak Ananth, Managing Director at Hewlett Packard Ventures. “Mesosphere’s DCOS is the most exciting new enterprise operating system since Linux, and Hewlett Packard Ventures is excited to partner with them to support their rapid growth.”

“Mesosphere is at the center of three of the biggest tech trends today — cloud, containerization, and microservices,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Cloud + Enterprise division. “Mesosphere’s DCOS is preferred by our enterprise customers given the maturity of the container orchestration solution, and that’s why we chose it as a key component for bringing containers to our enterprise-grade Microsoft Azure cloud platform.”

Mesosphere makes it simple for enterprises to build, install, manage and scale today’s must-have technologies, including Docker, Apache Cassandra, Jenkins, Apache Kafka and Apache Spark. Mesosphere’s DCOS and the open source technologies that comprise it (including Apache Mesos and Marathon) are proven foundations for building microservices-based applications, running big data systems and operating massive production container environments. The new products announced today further Mesosphere’s lead as the most production-proven platform for running modern applications.

Enterprises use the Mesosphere DCOS in production and at massive scale in some of the world’s largest private datacenters, including at Verizon. Customers can take advantage of DCOS in public cloud environments, as well. It can run on cloud instances just like it does on bare metal, and is a key component of Microsoft’s Azure Container Service.

Mesosphere DCOS is the first major operating system introduced since Android, and the first ever operating system purpose-built for datacenter-scale systems and applications. The open source core of DCOS, Apache Mesos, originally gained prominence as the key technology that killed the Fail Whale at Twitter, and was the platform on which Apache Spark was built at the University of California at Berkeley, AMPLab.

Mesosphere Velocity and Marathon v1.0
The open source Marathon 1.0 improves container operations through new features around networking and security, and kicks off an aggressive development roadmap over the next year that will bring about additional improvements in areas such as high availability, seamless upgrades and privacy. Marathon has a long list of production users, including Yelp, which uses it to launch more than 1 million containers a day for code testing.

Mesosphere Velocity complements Marathon by helping organizations accelerate application development lifecycle. Velocity makes it simple to deploy and manage scalable continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) environments — which today often involve code delivered via Docker containers. Velocity presently focuses on the industry standard Jenkins open source project and integrates with Marathon for a fully integrated container lifecycle. A large number of major companies, including eBay, already run massive CI/CD environments built on Mesos, Jenkins, Docker and other tools in order to speed up the process of pushing code live and making developers more agile. Velocity brings these same capabilities to every type of company.

“Software is eating the world and enterprises of all sizes are paying attention to a new class of applications that run at datacenter-scale,” said Florian Leibert, CEO and Co-founder at Mesosphere. “Whether you make toothbrushes or jet engines, you need an agile IT infrastructure that can run modern container applications and integrate analytics and big data technologies, but which can also support developers using continuous innovation cycles. DCOS is the first platform that takes the roadblocks out of the way so developers and operators can thrive in this new world of containers and distributed systems.”