CloudFoundry vs. D2iQ Mesosphere

It's well suited if:

• The organization has large number of applications that needs to be deployed frequently.
• The organization is tied to the DevOps mindset.
• The organization has programs in different languages.
• The applications does not need EJB's support that servers like web logic provide.

It's less suited if:

• The applications needs security configuration within the same CloudFoundry instance.
• The organization, for whatever reason does not want developers to manage the instances.

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

• Support for Orgs and Spaces that allow for managing users and deployables within a large organization.
• Easy deployment, deploying code is as simple as executing single line from CLI, thanks to build-packs.
• Solid and rich CLI, that allows for various operations on the instance.
• Isolated Virtual Machines called Droplets, that provide clean run time environment for the code. This used to be a problem with Weblogic and other application servers, where multiple applications are run on the same cluster and they share resources.
• SSH capability for the droplet (isolated VM's are called droplets), that allows for real time viewing of the App code while the application is running.
• Support for multiple languages, thanks to build-packs.
• Support for horizontal scaling, scaling an instance horizontally is a breeze.
• Support for configuring environment variable using the service bindings.
• Supports memory and disk space limit allocation for individual applications.
• Supports API's as well as workers (processes without endpoints)
• Supports blue-green deployment with minimal down time

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

• Does not support stateful containers and that would be a nice to have.
• Supports showing logs, but does not persist the logs anywhere. This makes relying on Cloud Foundry's logs very unreliable. The logs have to be persisted using other third party tools like Elk and Kibana.

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

While Docker shines in providing support for volumes and stateful instances, Cloud foundry shines in providing support for deploying stateless services. Heroku shines in integrating with Git and using commits to git as hooks to trigger deployments right from the command line. But it does not provide on-premise solution that Cloud foundry provides.

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

• Positive impact, since it simplifies the deployment time by a huge margin. Without cloud foundry, deploying a code needs coordination with infrastructure teams, while with cloud foundry, its a simple one line command. This reduces the deployment time from at least few hours to few minutes. Faster deployments promote faster dev cycle iterations.
• Code maintenance such as upgrading a Node or Java version is as simple as updating the build-pack. Without cloud foundry, using web logic, the specific version only supports a specific version of Java. So updating the version involves upgrading the version of web logic that needs to involve few teams. So without cloud foundry, it takes at least few days, with cloud foundry, its a matter of few mins.
• Overall, happier Developers and thats harder to quantify.

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