Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) vs. D2iQ Mesosphere

AKS works very well for running containerized applications that require high availability and scalability. This includes systems like our HRIS platform and customer-facing web applications. AKS is a good choice when applications are broken into multiple services that need independent scaling and deployment. It provides the flexibility needed to manage these architectures effectively. But for single, low-traffic applications or simple internal tools, AKS can be overkill. For scenarios like that Azure App Service would be better.

Incentivized

Mesosphere is well suited for orchestrating workloads. It supports Docker as a container as well as support others. It is highly suitable for running resilient and auto recovering big data/application containers. Mesosphere has proven time and again to be production ready at a massive scale. It supports native single button/API call scale up and scale down and supports various deployment patterns like Blue-Green and others.

Incentivized

• AKS makes it easier to replicate data to multiple regions
• Azure portal make it easier to manage the resources of the organization

Incentivized

• Deploying mesosphere and friends (e.g. marathon)
• Deploying applications (e.g. Cassandra, Jenkins, Spark) on to mesosphere
• Providing value add components such as velocity, and marathon-lb

Incentivized

• Steep learning curve
• Expected charges are unclear until you see real production usage
• Operations teams need to learn an entirely new skill set

Incentivized

• Setting up is a bit of a hassle, especially ZooKeeper state management and mesos and marathon quorum.
• Occasionally, I observed some failures when deploying something onto Marathon. Logging or detailed error reporting can help.
• Stale containers and inconsistent states resultant of the cluster failure are hard to solve and need a complete system restart to get it back to normal state.

Incentivized

As already said, the UI/CLI and even terraform are perfectly fine, but certain details could be documented better. For instance, if I want to secure the whole Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with my own managed keys, then it is very complex and hard to get there. Not really a single source that gives you the whole picture. Besides that, it is still good to use, in most cases intuitive but details mentioned as above can be tricky.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Amazon EKS stacked up very well and had better performance in some areas. However, Azure Kubernetes Service was a better fit given our Azure environment.

Incentivized

I happen to like mesosphere because it integrates well with a Jenkins based workflow, Deis is a little more Heroku like and it's not clear how to fit that model into a continuous-integration process. Kubernetes has also been criticized for being complicated.

Incentivized

• We had to spend more time on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) than on AWS and GCP to get our kubernetes cluster up and running
• The resources on nodes need to be left out unused, so effectively it is wasting money there
• It definitely made us spend more time into maintaining kubernetes

Incentivized

• I see mesosphere as having a positive impact overall on the industry trending Docker and containers in general.
• Seeing how mesosphere helps and simplifies things for the developer and ops, it is definitely a game changer.
• Native support of on demand scaling up and down as per the need is one of the best features.

Incentivized