Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Metaflow VS Apache Mesos

Compare Metaflow VS Apache Mesos and see what are their differences

Metaflow logo Metaflow

Framework for real-life data science; build, improve, and operate end-to-end workflows.

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.
  • Metaflow Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-03
  • Apache Mesos Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30

Metaflow features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Metaflow is designed with a strong focus on user experience, providing users with a simple and user-friendly interface for building and managing workflows. Its Pythonic API makes it easy for data scientists to work with complex data workflows without needing to learn a lot of new concepts.
  • Scalability
    Metaflow supports scalable data workflows, allowing users to run their workflows seamlessly from a laptop to the cloud. It integrates well with AWS, enabling users to utilize Amazon's scalable infrastructure for processing large datasets.
  • Versioning
    Metaflow provides built-in support for data and model versioning, making it easier for teams to track changes and reproduce results. This feature is crucial for maintaining consistency and reliability in machine learning projects.
  • Integration with Popular Tools
    Metaflow integrates well with popular data science and machine learning tools, including Jupyter notebooks and AWS services, enhancing its usability within existing data ecosystems.
  • Error Handling and Monitoring
    Metaflow offers robust error handling and monitoring capabilities, allowing users to track the execution of workflows, identify errors, and debug issues efficiently.

Possible disadvantages of Metaflow

  • AWS Dependency
    While Metaflow supports other infrastructures, it is tightly integrated with AWS. Users who do not use AWS may find it less convenient compared to other tools that are more agnostic in their cloud support.
  • Limited Support for Non-Python Environments
    Metaflow primarily supports Python, which might be a limitation for teams or projects that rely heavily on other programming languages for their workflows.
  • Learning Curve for Advanced Features
    Although Metaflow is designed to be user-friendly, utilizing its advanced features and realizing its full potential can have a steep learning curve, especially for users without prior experience with workflow management systems.
  • Community and Ecosystem Size
    Compared to some of its competitors, Metaflow has a smaller community and ecosystem, which might limit the availability of third-party resources, plugins, and community support.
  • Enterprise Features
    Some advanced enterprise features, while robust, may not be as developed or extensive compared to other dedicated data processing and workflow management platforms.

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 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.

Metaflow videos

useR! 2020: End-to-end machine learning with Metaflow (S. Goyal, B. Galvin, J. Ge), tutorial

More videos:

  • Review - Screencast: Metaflow Sandbox Example

Apache Mesos videos

Reactive Stream Processing Using Apache Mesos

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Metaflow and Apache Mesos)
Workflow Automation
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
12 12%
88% 88
DevOps Tools
33 33%
67% 67
Automation
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

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

Metaflow Reviews

Comparison of Python pipeline packages: Airflow, Luigi, Gokart, Metaflow, Kedro, PipelineX
Metaflow enables you to define your pipeline as a child class of FlowSpec that includes class methods with step decorators in Python code.
Source: medium.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

Metaflow might be a bit more popular than Apache Mesos. We know about 14 links to it since March 2021 and only 11 links to 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.

Metaflow mentions (14)

  • 20 Open Source Tools I Recommend to Build, Share, and Run AI Projects
    Metaflow is an open source framework developed at Netflix for building and managing ML, AI, and data science projects. This tool addresses the issue of deploying large data science applications in production by allowing developers to build workflows using their Python API, explore with notebooks, test, and quickly scale out to the cloud. ML experiments and workflows can also be tracked and stored on the platform. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Recapping the AI, Machine Learning and Computer Meetup — August 15, 2024
    As a data scientist/ML practitioner, how would you feel if you can independently iterate on your data science projects without ever worrying about operational overheads like deployment or containerization? Let’s find out by walking you through a sample project that helps you do so! We’ll combine Python, AWS, Metaflow and BentoML into a template/scaffolding project with sample code to train, serve, and deploy ML... - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • What are some open-source ML pipeline managers that are easy to use?
    I would recommend the following: - https://www.mage.ai/ - https://dagster.io/ - https://www.prefect.io/ - https://metaflow.org/ - https://zenml.io/home. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Needs advice for choosing tools for my team. We use AWS.
    1) I've been looking into [Metaflow](https://metaflow.org/), which connects nicely to AWS, does a lot of heavy lifting for you, including scheduling. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Selfhosted chatGPT with local contente
    Even for people who don't have an ML background there's now a lot of very fully-featured model deployment environments that allow self-hosting (kubeflow has a good self-hosting option, as do mlflow and metaflow), handle most of the complicated stuff involved in just deploying an individual model, and work pretty well off the shelf. Source: over 2 years ago
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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 / 2 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 / 11 months 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 / about 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 / about 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 / about 1 year ago
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What are some alternatives?

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

Apache Airflow - Airflow is a platform to programmaticaly author, schedule and monitor data pipelines.

Kubernetes - Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers

Luigi - Luigi is a Python module that helps you build complex pipelines of batch jobs.

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

Azkaban - Azkaban is a batch workflow job scheduler created at LinkedIn to run Hadoop jobs.

BOINC - BOINC is an open-source software platform for computing using volunteered resources