What's the difference between Apache's Mesos and Google's Kubernetes

Question

What exactly is the difference between Apache\'s Mesos and Google\'s Kubernetes? I understand both are server cluster management software. Can anyone elaborate where the mai

Answer 1

Both projects aim to make it easier to deploy & manage applications inside containers in your datacenter or cloud.

In order to deploy applications on top of Mesos, one can use Marathon or Kubernetes for Mesos.

Marathon is a cluster-wide init and control system for running Linux services in cgroups and Docker containers. Marathon has a number of different canary deploy features and is a very mature project.

Marathon runs on top of Mesos, which is a highly scalable, battle tested and flexible resource manager. Marathon is proven to scale and runs in many production environments.

The Mesos and Mesosphere technology stack provides a cloud-like environment for running existing Linux workloads, but it also provides a native environment for building new distributed systems.

Mesos is a distributed systems kernel, with a full API for programming directly against the datacenter. It abstracts underlying hardware (e.g. bare metal or VMs) away and just exposes the resources. It contains primitives for writing distributed applications (e.g. Spark was originally a Mesos App, Chronos, etc.) such as Message Passing, Task Execution, etc. Thus, entirely new applications are made possible. Apache Spark is one example for a new (in Mesos jargon called) framework that was built originally for Mesos. This enabled really fast development - the developers of Spark didn't have to worry about networking to distribute tasks amongst nodes as this is a core primitive in Mesos.

To my knowledge, Kubernetes is not used inside Google in production deployments today. For production, Google uses Omega/Borg, which is much more similar to the Mesos/Marathon model. However the great thing about using Mesos as the foundation is that both Kubernetes and Marathon can run on top of it.

More resources about Marathon:

https://mesosphere.github.io/marathon/

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZNGST2vIds