Apache Mesos Clusters – Part 1 - Virtual Elephant

I watched a webinar today from Ken Sipe (@kensipe) from Mesosphere on Mesos, Marathon and Chronos. The topics covered included how Mesos works, configuring and standup of a Mesos cluster in various public cloud offerings. If you are unfamiliar with Mesos, I would direct you to Mesosphere and the Apache Mesos Project.

The basic explanation of from the Apache Mesos Project page states:

Apache Mesos abstracts CPU, memory, storage, and other compute resources away from machines (physical or virtual), enabling fault-tolerant and elastic distributed systems to easily be built and run effectively.

Think turning an entire datacenter of compute resources into a single pool to be consumed. Instead of carving out individual pieces of compute, Mesos handles the scheduling and helps you scale an application across all of the resources available to it.

So how quickly can you deploy a cluster and begin using Mesos?

I have an AWS account that I use for non-VMware based technology testing, so I logged onto the Mesosphere site for spinning up a Mesos cluster in EC2 (elastic.mesosphere.io). Impressively enough, it took less than two minutes to have a Mesos cluster deploying and less than 15 minutes to actually have the cluster running and access.

Pretty great right?

From there it was a small matter of getting some of the examples Ken had provided on his webinar to have an actual workload running in the Mesos cluster I deployed. If you are interested, you can see his examples on GitHub (https://github.com/mesosphere/docker-mesos-marathon-screencast).

One of the things I wanted to test was the Docker integration that he spoke about. Unfortunately, Docker isn’t fully supported until Mesos 0.20+ and Marathon 0.7.0+ and the AWS deployments are still only using Mesos 0.19.1. I was pretty disappointed by this lack of functionality.

I am pretty excited to explore the Mesosphere stack further and become more familiar with Mesos itself. Next on the agenda is using the Big Data Extensions framework to mimic the same workflow within my VMware private cloud as Mesosphere offered through their website. Being able to rapidly deploy Mesos clusters and have several pre-built applications ready for use is something I am very interested in.