This morning, TechCrunch broke the story that Mesos support is coming to Windows. This story is meant to coincide with Ben Hindman’s MesosCon keynote, in which there will be a real, end-to-end demo showing us scheduling work on a cluster with a mix of Linux and Windows nodes.

For the vast majority of the project, I have been the only dedicated engineer working on this task. In the near future, we expect to spin up more people to make this production-worthy. It will be the only available cluster orchestration solution for groups with heterogeneous clusters.

The end goal of this work will allow users to manage clusters with a mix of Linux and Windows nodes as if it were a single pool of RAM and CPU. I believe that engineers should be able to run something like dcos install exchange-server and have it “just work” on their cluster.

The support that exists in the Mesos master branch includes (at this point) the CMake-based platform-independent build system, and a first cut at a port of the process library, which contains most of the systems layer. In the coming weeks we expect to integrate much more of this work into the master branch, and we hope the community will try it out!

As a final note, I do want to call out the people without whom this would have been impossible. First and foremost, my manager John Shewchuk, who was foolish enough to say yes when I pitched him the idea of porting Mesos to Windows. Second, John Gossman, cleared the road internally and provided a sounding board for ideas and concerns.

And third, but certainly not least: Mesosphere. I have been working out of their office for about a month, and they have been amazing. In particular, Ben Hindman and my stand-in manager Artem Harutyunyan, who provided the technical resources I needed to do this work, and without whom this simply would not have been possible.