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Kubernetes VS Apache Mesos

Compare Kubernetes VS Apache Mesos and see what are their differences

Kubernetes logo Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers

Apache Mesos logo Apache Mesos

Apache Mesos abstracts resources away from machines, enabling fault-tolerant and elastic distributed systems to easily be built and run effectively.
  • Kubernetes Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-24
  • Apache Mesos Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30

Kubernetes features and specs

  • Scalability
    Kubernetes excels in scaling applications horizontally by adding more containers to the deployment, ensuring that the application remains responsive even during high demand.
  • Portability
    Kubernetes supports a variety of environments including on-premises, hybrid, and public cloud infrastructures, offering flexibility and freedom from vendor lock-in.
  • High Availability
    Kubernetes ensures high availability through features like self-healing, automated rollouts and rollbacks, and various controller mechanisms to keep applications running reliably.
  • Extensibility
    Kubernetes has a modular architecture with a rich ecosystem of plugins, third-party tools, and extensions that allow customization and integration with various services.
  • Resource Efficiency
    Efficiently manages resources with features like autoscaling and resource quotas, helping to optimize usage and reduce costs.
  • Community and Support
    Kubernetes has a large, active community and strong industry support, which means abundant resources, tutorials, and third-party integrations are available.

Possible disadvantages of Kubernetes

  • Complexity
    The learning curve associated with Kubernetes is steep due to its numerous components, configurations, and operational paradigms.
  • Resource Intensive
    Running a Kubernetes cluster can be resource-intensive, often requiring significant CPU, memory, and storage resources, which can be costly.
  • Operational Challenges
    Managing a Kubernetes cluster requires expertise in areas such as networking, security, and cluster lifecycle management, making it challenging for smaller teams or organizations.
  • Debugging and Troubleshooting
    Pinpointing issues within a Kubernetes cluster can be difficult due to its distributed and dynamic nature, which can complicate debugging and troubleshooting processes.
  • Configuration Overhead
    Kubernetes involves numerous configurations and settings, which can be overwhelming and error-prone, especially during initial setup and deployment.
  • Security Management
    While Kubernetes provides various security features, managing those securely requires in-depth knowledge and diligence, as misconfigurations can lead to vulnerabilities.

Apache Mesos features and specs

  • Scalability
    Apache Mesos is designed to scale to thousands of nodes, making it ideal for large-scale distributed systems.
  • Resource Isolation
    Mesos uses containerization techniques (like Docker and Mesos containers) to provide resource isolation, ensuring applications run in their own secure environments.
  • Fault Tolerance
    The framework is built with fault tolerance in mind. It continuously monitors the health of all nodes and can move tasks from failing nodes to healthy ones.
  • Multi-Framework Support
    Mesos can manage multiple types of workloads through different frameworks like Apache Spark, Apache Hadoop, and Kubernetes simultaneously on the same cluster.
  • Resource Efficient
    It provides fine-grained resource allocation, allowing multiple applications to share a single cluster, which leads to more efficient resource utilization.

Possible disadvantages of Apache Mesos

  • Steep Learning Curve
    Setting up and managing a Mesos cluster can be complex and requires a thorough understanding of the framework and its components.
  • Operational Complexity
    Mesos requires additional components like Marathon (for container orchestration) which adds to the operational overhead.
  • Maturity
    While Mesos is a robust system, it may not be as mature or feature-rich as some cloud-native solutions like Kubernetes, which have seen wider adoption.
  • Community Support
    As Mesos is somewhat overshadowed by Kubernetes, it has a smaller community and fewer third-party integrations compared to more popular orchestration tools.
  • Ecosystem Integration
    Many new-age DevOps tools and CI/CD pipelines are primarily designed with Kubernetes in mind, which might result in limited integration capabilities with Mesos.

Analysis of Kubernetes

Overall verdict

  • Kubernetes is generally considered to be an excellent choice for managing containerized applications, especially for organizations aiming for scalability, flexibility, and resiliency. However, it comes with a steep learning curve and requires proper management and maintenance to fully utilize its potential.

Why this product is good

  • Kubernetes is widely regarded as a powerful and versatile platform for container orchestration. It automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, which helps in efficiently handling workloads and ensuring high availability. Its open-source nature and a large, active community contribute to continuous improvements and a rich ecosystem of tools and extensions. Kubernetes supports a wide range of container runtimes and cloud platforms, making it a preferred choice for enterprises looking to deploy applications in a cloud-agnostic manner. Moreover, it offers advanced features such as self-healing, service discovery, load balancing, and secret management, making it a robust solution for modern DevOps practices.

Recommended for

  • Organizations with significant containerized workloads
  • Teams that require multi-cloud or hybrid cloud deployments
  • Enterprises focusing on DevOps and continuous delivery practices
  • Scalable microservices-based applications
  • Businesses that have resources to manage complex orchestration tools

Analysis of Apache Mesos

Overall verdict

  • Apache Mesos is a strong choice for organizations looking for a scalable and flexible resource management system, especially if they have diverse workloads that require efficient orchestration. However, its complexity might pose a challenge for smaller teams or use cases that do not require such extensive features.

Why this product is good

  • Apache Mesos is known for its ability to abstract the entire data center into a single pool of resources, thus simplifying resource management and allocation for distributed systems. It allows for efficient sharing of resources across different applications and offers strong support for container orchestration, microservices, and big data applications. Mesos is highly adaptable and can work with a variety of different workload types, making it suitable for diverse environments.

Recommended for

  • Large organizations with complex infrastructure needs.
  • Teams that require high scalability and flexibility.
  • Projects that involve big data frameworks like Apache Spark or Hadoop.
  • Development environments necessitating custom resource scheduling.

Kubernetes videos

Kubernetes in 5 mins

More videos:

  • Review - Kubernetes Documentation
  • Review - Module 1: Istio - Kubernetes - Getting Started - Installation and Sample Application Review
  • Review - Deploying WordPress on Kubernetes, Step-by-Step

Apache Mesos videos

Reactive Stream Processing Using Apache Mesos

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Kubernetes and Apache Mesos)
Developer Tools
88 88%
12% 12
DevOps Tools
89 89%
11% 11
Containers As A Service
75 75%
25% 25
Cloud Computing
100 100%
0% 0

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Kubernetes and Apache Mesos

Kubernetes Reviews

The Top 7 Kubernetes Alternatives for Container Orchestration
Rancher RKE is an interface to the command line for Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) and OpenShift. Both are software tools employed to deploy Kubernetes, an open source project that manages containers on several hosts.
Kubernetes Alternatives 2023: Top 8 Container Orchestration Tools
Azure Kubernetes Service is a container orchestration platform that offers secure serverless Kubernetes. AKS helps to manage Kubernetes clusters and makes deploying containerized applications so much easier. In addition to that, it provides automatic configuration of all Kubernetes nodes and master.
Top 12 Kubernetes Alternatives to Choose From in 2023
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is a prominent choice for a Kubernetes alternative. It is provided and managed by Google Cloud, which offers fully managed Kubernetes services.
Source: humalect.com
Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes: how to choose a container orchestration tool
In this article, we explored the two primary orchestrators of the container world, Kubernetes and Docker Swarm. Docker Swarm is a lightweight, easy-to-use orchestration tool with limited offerings compared to Kubernetes. In contrast, Kubernetes is complex but powerful and provides self-healing, auto-scaling capabilities out of the box. K3s, a lightweight form of Kubernetes...
Source: circleci.com
Docker Alternatives
An open-source code, Rancher is another one among the list of Docker alternatives that is built to provide organizations with everything they need. This software combines the environments required to adopt and run containers in production. A rancher is built on Kubernetes. This tool helps the DevOps team by making it easier to testing, deploying and managing the...
Source: www.educba.com

Apache Mesos Reviews

Docker Alternatives
Another Docker alternative is Apache Mesos. This tool is designed to leverage the features of modern kernels in order to carry out functions like resource isolation, prioritization, limiting & accounting. These functions are generally carried out by groups in the Linux or zones in the Solaris. What Mesos does is, it provides isolation for the Memory, I/O devices, file...
Source: www.educba.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Kubernetes seems to be a lot more popular than Apache Mesos. While we know about 365 links to Kubernetes, we've tracked only 11 mentions of Apache Mesos. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Kubernetes mentions (365)

  • Platform Engineering for the uninitiated
    The solution to this problem started with setting up different teams for both - and ClickOps was coined. As cloud technologies evolved, people realized that it was getting increasingly difficult to keep systems in sync given the room for human error. Naturally, it evolved to the adoption of scripting based pipelines, and it led to the birth of DevOps. This bridged the gap between development and operations quite a... - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Kubernetes Overview: Container Orchestration & Cloud-Native
    Kubernetes.io - The official project website containing comprehensive documentation, tutorials, and release information. Essential reading for understanding core concepts and staying current with platform updates. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • 10 DevOps Tasks Iโ€™ve Stopped Doing Manually (Kudos to 'This' CLI Agent)
    When I need a Dockerfile or Kubernetes manifest, I just describe it to Forge. For instance, I asked Forge to fix a failing Docker build with a permission error, and it immediately spotted that files were being created as root and suggested adding a chown or switching to a non-root user โ€“ exactly the real fix we needed. Beyond fixes, Forge can draft new container files from a prompt (โ€œgenerate a Dockerfile for a... - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Autonomous SRE: Revolutionizing Reliability with AI, Automation, and Chaos Engineering
    Self-Healing Pods/Containers: Platforms like Kubernetes inherently offer self-healing capabilities, automatically restarting or rescheduling unhealthy containers or pods to maintain desired service levels. This is fundamental to cloud-native resilience. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • First Kubernetes Deployment with Minikube
    Kubernetes Kubernetes is a tool for orchestrating(managing) docker containers. With this tool you can deploy, scale and manage your containerized apps. Kubernetes commonly used in developing and production. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
View more

Apache Mesos mentions (11)

  • Erlang's not about lightweight processes and message passing
    Erlang, OTP, and the BEAM offer much more than just behaviours. The VM is similar to a virtual kernel with supervisor, isolated processes, and distributed mode that treats multiple (physical or virtual) machines as a single pool of resources. OTP provides numerous useful modes, such as Mnesia (database) and atomic counters/ETS tables (for caching), among others. The runtime also supports bytecode hot-reloading, a... - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • Kubernetes Simplified: A Comprehensive Introduction for Beginners
    Apache Mesos, a robust cluster manager, excels at handling diverse workloads beyond just containers, offering flexibility for organizations with varying needs. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Containers Orchestration and Kubernetes
    Even though this article will be focused on Kubernetes I want to mention that there are multiple container orchestration platforms such as Mesos, Docker Swarm, OpenShift, Rancher, Hashicorp Nomad, etc. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • eBPF, sidecars, and the future of the service mesh
    I worked at several Bay Area startups, mainly in NLP and machine learning roles. I was part of a company called PowerSet, which was building a natural language processing engine and was acquired by Microsoft. I then joined Twitter in its early days, around 2010, when it had about 200 employees. I started on the AI side but transitioned to infrastructure because I found it more satisfying and challenging. We were... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Upgrading Hundreds of Kubernetes Clusters
    When we adopted Kubernetes at Criteo, we encountered initial hurdles. In 2018, Kubernetes operators were still new, and there was internal competition from Mesos. We addressed these challenges by validating Kubernetes performance for our specific needs and building custom Chef recipes, StatefulSet hooks, and startup scripts. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Kubernetes and Apache Mesos, you can also consider the following products

Rancher - Open Source Platform for Running a Private Container Service

Docker - Docker is an open platform that enables developers and system administrators to create distributed applications.

Charity Engine - Charity Engine takes enormous, expensive computing jobs and chops them into 1000s of small pieces...

Helm.sh - The Kubernetes Package Manager

JPPF - The open source grid computing solution.

Google Kubernetes Engine - Google Kubernetes Engine is a powerful cluster manager and orchestration system for running your Docker containers. Set up a cluster in minutes.