DCOs

DC/OS, short for Datacenter Operating System, is a distributed operating system designed to manage large-scale clusters for running containerized and data-processing workloads. It was developed in the Apache Mesos ecosystem and is built on top of Apache Mesos to provide resource isolation, scheduling, and a unified view of a data center. The platform exposes a single interface for deploying and monitoring services across thousands of machines, helping abstract the complexities of large-scale infrastructure.

Key components of DC/OS include the Mesos master and agents, Zookeeper for coordination, Marathon as the container orchestration framework, the DC/OS command line interface and web user interface, and the Universe package repository for installing services and applications. DC/OS integrates container support, including Docker, and leverages native Mesos frameworks to run diverse workloads. It also provides mechanisms for service discovery and load balancing, persistent storage options, and multi-tenant resource isolation. The platform supports deployment lifecycle management, scheduling policies, and rolling updates, and can host data-processing stacks such as Hadoop, Cassandra, and Elasticsearch through packaged services.

DC/OS has been marketed for on-premises data centers as well as hybrid cloud environments. It originated within the Apache Mesos ecosystem and later became a product under Mesosphere, which rebranded as D2iQ. The company offers an enterprise edition with additional security, governance, and management features, while the open-source core provides the underlying Mesos-based scheduler and orchestration capabilities.

In practice, DC/OS provides an alternative to other cluster-management ecosystems, with a broader focus on coordinating a mix of long-running services, data services, and batch workloads. Kubernetes has become a dominant standard for container orchestration in many organizations, and there are integration paths and use cases for running Kubernetes alongside or on top of DC/OS.