Apache Mesos vs. Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud

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

RedHat OpenShift is not only suited for IBM Cloud but can run in ANY cloud. We installed in Azure Cloud, for example. It can also run on Linux servers or a Power 9 machine. It is built for multi-cloud or on-prem environments. IBM support provides such excellent guidance in the installation and configuration that no other product on the market can beat it.

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

• Multiclick provisioning of resources makes it super easy to manage pods and deployments. We don't have to maintain code for the same
• In built security features and customizability ensures that organization wide standards are integrated well into the containers
• Automated backups, scale ups and fail recovery makes sure of minimal down time

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

• I wish it had better compatibility with docker file syntax. We had issues when it couldn't build standard docker files
• Wish it had better documentation
• Wish they offered fully supported client libraries for the Openshift API rather than dumping it on a 3rd party

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I think response time for IBM Cloud support should be improved.

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

We evaluated a number of potential solutions and ultimately chose Red Hat OpenShift because it was compatible with our existing technology. Time and costs savings have been realized throughout the company since we implemented Red Hat OpenShift, and the IT department has been freed up to focus on activities that are more valuable.

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

• Our customer satisfaction and NPS score has had positive outcomes based on new architecture
• We are focused on business outcomes vs running the service and maintenance
• OpenShift on IBM Cloud has had a direct, positive impact on TCO, ROI, and payback period
• Our staff is more focused on higher-level business activities, i.e. acquiring & customer retention

Incentivized