Hewlett Packard Enterprise has led a $73.5 million funding round into Mesosphere, creators of the one of the world’s first Datacentre Operating Systems (DCOS).

The Series C funding round saw Microsoft join as a new strategic investor, joining previous Mesosphere investors Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and Fuel Capital. Additional new investors also included A Capital and Triangle Peak Partners.

Bringing the total funding to date to nearly $126 million, the investment in Mesosphere reinforces the increasing enterprise shift to Container, Microservices and Distributed Computing Architectures.

"Mesosphere is at the centre 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. 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.

"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."

Announced alongside the strategic investment round, Mesosphere also released 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.

The open source Marathon 1.0 improves container operations through new features around networking and security, while Mesosphere Velocity complements Marathon by helping organizations accelerate application development lifecycle.