Apache Mesos vs Marathon: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this blog post, we will discuss the key differences between Apache Mesos and Marathon, two popular technologies used in the world of distributed systems and container orchestration.

1. Resource Management: Apache Mesos focuses on resource management in a distributed environment, providing a framework for sharing and managing computing resources across clusters. It offers fine-grained resource allocation, allowing multiple frameworks to coexist and share resources efficiently. On the other hand, Marathon is a framework built on top of Mesos, specifically designed for long-running applications. It provides features like task scheduling, fault tolerance, and scaling, making it a powerful tool for managing and scaling applications.

2. Scheduling: Mesos provides a pluggable scheduler interface, allowing developers to choose different schedulers based on their requirements. It supports various scheduling strategies, including hierarchical and dominant resource fair sharing. Marathon, being a framework that runs on Mesos, leverages its scheduling capabilities and provides advanced features like constraints, health checks, and task dependency management. It allows operators to define complex scheduling rules and ensure high availability and fault tolerance of applications.

3. Application Scope: Mesos offers a broader scope, managing the allocation of resources for various types of workloads, including containers, virtual machines, and data processing frameworks. It allows running different frameworks like Hadoop, Spark, and TensorFlow simultaneously on the same cluster. On the other hand, Marathon focuses solely on managing long-running services and applications, providing features like load balancing, service discovery, and health monitoring.

4. Architecture and Dependencies: Mesos operates at the cluster level, providing resource management and scheduling capabilities to frameworks. It uses a master-slave architecture, where the Mesos master manages resource offers and the Mesos slaves execute tasks. Marathon, on the other hand, runs as a framework scheduler on top of Mesos, deploying and managing applications. It depends on Mesos for resource allocation and leverages its features for distributed scheduling.

5. User Interface and API: Mesos provides a web-based user interface and a RESTful API for managing and monitoring the cluster resources. It allows users to view resource utilization, framework statistics, and perform administrative tasks. Marathon also offers a web-based interface and a RESTful API for managing applications. It provides features like scaling up/down, restarting, and scaling application instances.

6. Use Cases: Apache Mesos is suitable for large-scale, distributed systems where efficient resource utilization and sharing are critical. It is widely used by organizations running big data processing workloads, web services, and microservices architectures. Marathon, being a framework built on top of Mesos, is specifically designed for managing long-running services and applications. It is commonly used in production environments for running web applications, databases, and other stateful services.

In summary, Apache Mesos focuses on resource management and allows running multiple frameworks simultaneously, while Marathon provides high-level features for managing long-running services and applications on top of Mesos.