Mesos offers huge benefits to both developers and operators. The ability of Mesos to consolidate various frameworks on a common infrastructure not only saves on infrastructure costs, but also provides operational benefits to the Ops teams and simplifies developers' view of the infrastructure, ultimately leading to business success. Here are some of the reasons for organizations to embrace Mesos:
Mesos supports a wide variety of workloads, ranging from batch processing (Hadoop), interactive analysis (Spark), real-time processing (Storm, Samza), graph processing (Hama), high-performance computing (MPI), data storage (HDFS, Tachyon, and Cassandra), web applications (play), continuous integration (Jenkins, GitLab), and a number of other frameworks. Moreover, meta-scheduling frameworks, such as Marathon and Aurora can run most of the existing applications on Mesos without any modification. Mesos is an ideal choice for running containers at scale. This flexibility makes Mesos very easy to adopt.
Mesos improves utilization through elastic resource sharing between various frameworks. Without a common data center operating system, different frameworks have to run on siloed hardware. Such static partitioning of resources leads to resource fragmentation, limiting the utilization and throughput. Dynamic resource sharing through Mesos drives higher utilization and throughput.
Mesos is an open source project with a vibrant community. The Mesos pluggable architecture makes it easy to customize it for the organization's needs. Combined with the fact that Mesos runs on a wide range of operating systems and hardware choices, it provides the widest range of options and guards against vendor lock-in. Thus, developing against the Mesos API provides many choices of infrastructure for running them. It also means that the Mesos applications will be portable across bare metal, virtualized infrastructure, and cloud providers.
Probably, the most important benefit of Mesos is empowering developers to build modern applications with increased productivity. As developers move from developing applications for a single computer to a program against data centers, they need an API that allows them to focus on their logic and not on the nitty-gritty details of the distributed infrastructure. With Mesos, the developers do not have to worry about the distributed aspects and can focus on the domain-specific logic of the application. Mesos provides a rich API to develop scalable and fault-tolerant distributed applications, as we will see in Chapter 7, Developing Frameworks on Mesos.
Operating a large infrastructure is challenging. Mesos simplifies infrastructure management by providing a unified view of resources. It brings a lot of agility and deploying new services takes a shorter time with Mesos since there is no separate cluster to be allocated. Mesos is extremely Ops-friendly and treats infrastructure resources like cattle and not pets. What this means is that Mesos is resilient in the face of failures and can automatically ensure high availability, without requiring manual intervention. Mesos supports multitenant deployment with strong isolation, which is essential for operating at scale. Mesos provides full-featured REST, web, and command-line interfaces and integrates well with the existing tools, as we will see in Chapter 8, Administering Mesos.
Mesos is battle-tested at Twitter, Airbnb, HubSpot, eBay, Netflix, Conviva, Groupon, and a number of other organizations. Mesos catering to the needs of a wide variety of use cases across different companies is proof of Mesos's versatility as a data center kernel.
Mesos also offers significant benefits over traditional virtualization-based infrastructure:
Most of the applications do not require strong isolation provided by virtual machines and can run on container-based isolation in Mesos. Since containers have much lower overheads than to VMs, this not only leads to higher consolidation but also has other benefits, such as fast start-up time and so on.
Mesos reduces infrastructure complexity drastically compared to VMs.
Achieving fault tolerance and high availability using VMs is very costly and hard. With Mesos, hardware failures are transparent to applications, and the Mesos API helps developers in embracing failures.
Now that we have seen the benefits of running Mesos, let's create a single-node Mesos cluster and start exploring Mesos.