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.
DO Kubernetes is well-suited for: - deploying APIs - deploying workers - log collection and analysis (ie ELK stack) - deploying Helm charts and anything that can be mapped on to K8s concepts Less appropriate for anything requiring no public Internet access (ie VPC only). Less appropriate for anything requiring integration with the DO app platform via VPC, at the moment.
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.
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.
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.
DigitalOcean is the most affordable and straightforward of the hosted Kubernetes options we evaluated. All features that we require are supported without an excess of complication of extraneous features. Straightforward billing is also very important for us in comparison to the Big Three cloud hosts, which have very complicated billing practices. DigitalOcean also provides a platform with very little vendor lock-in.
