D2iQ Mesosphere vs. Google Kubernetes Engine

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

The Google Kubernetes Engine clusters are very good at being a managed cloud K8s platform - lots of documentation, features, and updates are available. It's also newbie-friendly - for both administrators and developers. Unfortunately, currently, it cannot reach true zero scale - thus, costs (rent for the service) are still involved even if you are barely using it. Thankfully, it's possible to have alternatives in Google Cloud:

• Your own K8s cluster on Compute Engine VMs - you manage it completely; it will have access to a lot of Google Cloud services.
• Cloud Run cluster - less documented but more flexible
• Anthos clusters - you can use this service for a lot of types of K8s clusters - Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, on-prem, AWS, Azure

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

• Deployment of a new GKE cluster is really fast in comparison to other cloud providers.
• GCP is ahead other vendors and always provide the most up to date Kubernetes version.
• GKE automation for master upgrade and the worker nodes pool works really well.

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

• Not as intuitive as it could be
• Documentation could be better, especially for people using other Google Cloud tools
• Not the preferred Kubernetes Engine for many apps

Incentivized

• Google Kubernetes Engine has a good UI and documentation that facilitates setup and helps get projects moving along quickly
• Its built-in logging integrations with StackDriver make it easier to monitor the application and log issues quickly
• Automated orchestration, deployment, and scaling of nodes and networking are all easily configurable with yaml files

Incentivized

Very good Kubernetes distribution with a reasonable total price. Integration with storage and load balancer for ingress and services speed up every process deployment.

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

GKE spins up new nodes a LOT faster than AKS. GKE's auto scaler runs a lot smoother than AKS. GKE has a lot more Kubernetes features baked in natively.

Incentivized

• When issues came up, we reached out to some folks at GCP and they seemed to be very prompt and attentive to our needs. They were always willing to help and provide additional details or recommendations or links to resources. This kind of support is very helpful as it allows us to navigate GKE with more confidence.

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

• Positive: Allowed us to start and produce working software regardless of our experience level.
• Positive: Integration with other Google Cloud services that we wanted to use anyway.
• Negative: It's kinda clunky, and some scenarios seem Google Kubernetes Engine-specific instead of being more integrated with other Google Cloud services or the web UI.

Incentivized