Apache Mesos vs. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

There's really no reason to ever use Mesos. We switched over to Kubernetes and it's been a breath of fresh air - better CD support, easy CLI for browsing logs, no mysterious dangling redeploys. If you're looking for a tool to manage a fleet of Docker containers on VMs, Kubernetes beats Mesos by a wide margin.

Incentivized

At one instance, there was a fire in our data center and the backup power had some issues because of which the whole DC went down. I believe with AKS and the replication it's easier to handle such a situation. Also, the scenario would have been pretty transparent to the end-users.

Incentivized

• Mesos may have many frameworks. If you have Mesos installed on your servers, you may use it for many kinds of tasks. Today we're running only web applications but the idea is to install a different framework for big data soon.
• There is a good community growing around it.

Incentivized

• Highly repeatable process
• Minimizes the amount of software to install
• Easily scale resources to meet demand

Incentivized

• Unreliable deployments that would fail for no good reason. Sometimes our Docker container would be "restarting" forever because Mesos thought it didn't have enough resources to start the container.
• Impossibly slow UI. Built in React under the hood with a lot of bloatware backed in, so loading the Mesos UI on a slow internet connection was painful.
• No real logging solution - it would stream "console.log()" output to the UI, but searching for logs wasn't really possible without downloading a huge file.
• No built-in support for redeploying containers from a CI. We had to create a service whose whole job was to expose an HTTP endpoint that restarted a container, and then made Circle CI ping the endpoint whenever we wanted to redeploy.

Incentivized

• Need to update cluster manually
• Policies cannot be updated for existing components
• if any change in policy every has to create cluster

Incentivized

No real support channel, the Mesos GitHub issues list was the only one we found and it wasn't particularly helpful.

Incentivized

Microsoft support was really good, whenever we raise any ticket they come back to us within a couple of hours.

Incentivized

Kubernetes is really great and their community is growing really fast (Google influence). We evaluated it in the beginning and it would fit for our web applications workload. We decided to proceed with Mesos because it has more potential. You may use a different framework for different kinds of tasks on Mesos. There is a Kubernetes framework for Mesos, by the way.

Incentivized

The ability to create new instances (i.e. elastic provisioning) is probably the fastest with Azure Kubernetes Service compared to the alternatives that I have looked at. From a pricing perspective, Microsoft always seems to find a way to be more competitive in this area, and literally every other field they play in.

Incentivized

• It's optimizing our resources.
• It's improving our process. This argument is not just for Mesos, but we needed a tool like this to start changing and it works like a charm.
• It's open source.

Incentivized

• Positive impact in moving applications to cloud from the in-hose data center to save cost
• Sometimes got affected with some bugs on the AKS infrastructure but hasn't caused a big kios as our production footprint in AKS is not yet high

Incentivized