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Apache Mesos to be moved to Attic

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Re: Apache Mesos to be moved to Attic

#4

Post by specialp »

We used Mesos as our first container orchestration stack. It worked OK but Kubernetes came along and offered a one stop solution for everything. In Mesos you had to use separate projects for container management (Marathon), discoverability (Consul/HAPROXY). It seemed more geared to people that wanted to run their own stacks for such tasks. For a small to medium sized operation it was difficult to solve these issues where really they are issues everyone running a stack of containers has. This was in 2014 so it was early but k8s came along with everything we needed.

Re: Apache Mesos to be moved to Attic

#5

Post by kevincox »

I used mesos a while ago across a couple of cheep VPS for personal projects and services and it was great. I especially liked that I could used a shell executor to run services with filesystem access. For many environments this probably didn't make sense but for me I could put some secrets on the filesystem and services could make unix sockets available to nginx for SSL and hostname based forwarding.

Also with Nix I could easily install software the specific services needed and it was trivial to integrate into the garbage collector making it much faster than launching a docker container.

That being said the project wasn't moving that fast and it was a bit buggly for me and nodes would regularly get into loops where they couldn't authenticate with the master for various reasons (I think there were timing issues and timeouts that caused issues over the internet). Now I'm using Kubernetes but I have all of this complicated virtual networking that I don't need, I'm locked into docker-like containers and the thing is so complicated that I need to pay someone to run it for me.

Re: Apache Mesos to be moved to Attic

#6

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

I used Mesos for a few years before experiencing Kubernetes. As neat as Mesos was, it was doomed from the start.

For one, Kubernetes was, at least to some extent, a rewrite and extraction of functionality built at Google, from their production orchestration ecosystem that is Borg. The fact that Kubernetes was heavily influenced by a successful, large solution in this space allowed it to leapfrog, at least a bit, the competition.

Mesos was trying to become a solution seemingly from scratch. I worked with and interacted with a number of Mesos project members and committers, and while they were generally bright folks, their industry experience was surprisingly shallow. In my experience, Mesos changed frequently and there were enough unknown TBD components at the edges of the ecosystem to make it somewhat volatile.

Within a year Kubernetes was waaaaay ahead and Mesos started considering pivoting to support k8s.

I no longer see a purpose in Mesos, and frankly, that's okay. Too many Apache projects are on eternal life support, and they lower the bar for the rest of the Apache ecosystem, which has sort of begun to earn a poor reputation for quality (ala some of the fringe Boost libraries). Apache Foundation is no longer a label for solid, reliable software.

Re: Apache Mesos to be moved to Attic

#7

Post by dragonsh »

fiberoptick wrote: post #2

End of an era... Are there any viable alternatives to Kubernetes and Nomad?

For over 90% of workloads kubernetes is an overkill. Only when company is reaching google scale kubernetes make sense.

A good alternative to kubernetes is LXD [1] or just stick with docker compose. Kubernetes except for managed services from cloud providers is more difficult than an average application to manage and a huge cost in itself to run and maintain.

[1] https://www.linuxcontainers.org/

Re: Apache Mesos to be moved to Attic

#9

Post by dharmab »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #6

I used Mesos for a few years before experiencing Kubernetes. As neat as Mesos was, it was doomed from the start. For one, Kubernetes was, at least to some extent, a rewrite and extraction of functionality built at Google, from their production orchestration ecosystem that is Borg. The fact that Kubernetes was heavily influenced by a successful, large solution in this space allowed it to leapfrog, at least a bit, the…

We used Mesos in production until 2020 (started transition to Kubernetes in 2018), and this comment is incredibly accurate. Mesos was an interesting project but the defaults were incredibly naive about production environments.

Two concrete examples: Mesos maintenance mode vs Kubernetes' cordoning and eviction APIs, and Mesos's default behavior when a Node is suddenly powered off vs Kubernetes'.

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