The container landscape is still very young and
rapidly evolving. Expect the core capabilities of all
the tools to continue to improve quickly.
already a number of third-party plugins available
from Weave, Project Calico, VMware, Cisco, Mido-
kura and Microsoft.
Mesos adopts a networking strategy that is similar to
the older Docker model and requires port mapping
and an IP address per node. There is definitely room
for improvement for Mesos with regards to container
networking. However, there was a demo at MesosCon
in August of new experimental support for using Proj-
ect Calico. While Calico can also be used with K8s and
Docker, it’s particularly helpful for Mesos where there
are less networking options widely available.
Comparison Summary
While it’s still early we can see from theses compari-
sons a few areas where each tool shines.
Docker
Swarm
Machine
Compose
Kubernetes Mesos/
Mesosphere
2.7 4.7 4.7
Master Failover 4 4 5
App Health check 3 5 4
Auto reschedule
on failure 1 5 5
3.5 3.5 4.3
High Availability
Extending Beyond Containers Scalable and
Battle Tested All projects are open-source, so they are easy to fork
and contribute to. Mesos is built as a platform and has
many frameworks for non-container solutions. These
frameworks include Hadoop, Cassandra, Jenkins, etc.
While you need the commercial Mesosphere product
to get the improved install and management experi-
ence, the organization has done a great job contrib-
uting back to the Mesos OS projects. Kubernetes and
Swarm are focused on containers for the time being.
K8s can be run with non-Docker containers, but it is
still container focused. Large Scale 4 4.5 5/5
Battle Tested
(Real World Use) 3 2.5 5/2
3.0 3.0 4.3
5 5 5/2
1 1 5/5
4.0 3.8 3.0
Caveats required 4 3.8 2/4
4.5 4.5 3.5
These tools are not always a one-to-one comparison,
so metrics are chosen in order to allow for compari-
son in their current state. In some cases these prod-
ucts should be combined for the best result. For
example, the Mesos-Swarm and Mesos-Kubernetes
project gives you the potential of having a highly
available system with master-failover capabilities,
while simultaneously providing the features of Swarm
or Kubernetes!
48 | THE DOPPLER | WINTER 2016
Extensibility Beyond
Containers
Open-Source
Uses beyond
containers
Ease of Adoption
Variety of skills
Networking
Mesos
Mesos is used in big production deployments and if
you want to run a cluster of a variety of services, not
just containers, Mesos is the way to go. This is espe-
cially true if you have are building distributed sys-
tems or have “Big Data” components as there are
already Mesos frameworks for Hadoop, Spark, Cas-
sandra, and many more.