Apache Mesos

Developer(s)	Apache Software Foundation
Stable release	1.11.0 / November 24, 2020; 4 years ago (2020-11-24)[1]
Repository	Mesos Repository
Written in	C++
Type	Cluster management software
License	Apache License 2.0
Website	Official website

Apache Mesos is an open-source project to manage computer clusters. It was developed at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mesos began as a research project in the UC Berkeley RAD Lab by then-PhD students Benjamin Hindman, Andy Konwinski, and Matei Zaharia, as well as professor Ion Stoica. The students started working on the project as part of a course taught by David Culler. It was originally named Nexus but due to a conflict with another university's project, was renamed to Mesos.^[2]

Mesos was first presented in 2009 (while still named Nexus) by Andy Konwinski at HotCloud '09 in a talk accompanying the first paper published about the project.^[3] Later in 2011, it was presented in a more mature state in a talk by Zaharia at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation conference about the paper "Mesos: A Platform for Fine-Grained Resource Sharing in the Data Center" by Benjamin Hindman, Andy Konwinski, Zaharia, Ali Ghodsi, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy Katz, Scott Shenker, and Ion Stoica.^[4]

On July 27, 2016, the Apache Software Foundation announced version 1.0.^[5] It added the ability to centrally supply Docker, rkt, and appc instances.^[6]

On April 5, 2021, it was voted to move Mesos to the Apache Attic,^[7] however, the vote was cancelled two days later due to increased interest.^[8]

As of 2025, Apache Mesos remains an active Apache project but with minimal development activity. The last stable release was version 1.11.0 in November 2020.^[9] Since 2021, the project has had no new committers or Project Management Committee (PMC) members,^[10] and development consists primarily of minor bug fixes and patches. While the project avoided being moved to the Apache Attic in 2021, it has effectively entered a maintenance-only phase with minimal community activity.

Mesos uses Linux cgroups to provide isolation for CPU, memory, I/O, and file systems.^[11] Mesos is comparable to Google's Borg scheduler, a platform used internally to manage and distribute Google's services.^[12]

Apache Aurora

Developer(s)	Apache Software Foundation
Final release	0.22.0 / December 12, 2019; 5 years ago (2019-12-12)[13]
Repository	Aurora Repository
Written in	Java, Python
Type	Mesos Framework
License	Apache License 2.0
Website	aurora.apache.org

Apache Aurora is a Mesos framework for both long-running services and cron jobs, originally developed by Twitter starting in 2010 and open sourced in late 2013.^[14] It can scale to tens of thousands of servers and holds many similarities to Borg,^[15][16] including its rich domain-specific language (DSL) for configuring services. As of February 2020, the project was retired to the Apache Attic.^[17] A fork of the project was maintained by former members, hosted on GitHub under the name Aurora Scheduler.^[18]

Chronos is a distributed cron-like system which is elastic and capable of expressing dependencies between jobs.^[19]

Marathon is promoted for platform as a service or container orchestration system scaling to thousands of physical servers. It is fully REST-based and allows canary-style deployments and deployment topologies. It is written in the programming language Scala.^[20]

Several organizations have adopted Mesos for large-scale production deployments:

Twitter began using Mesos and Apache Aurora in 2010, after Hindman gave a presentation to a group of Twitter engineers.^[12]

Airbnb stated in July 2013 that it uses Mesos to run data processing systems like Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark.^[21]

eBay reported in April 2014 that it used Mesos to run continuous integration on a per-developer basis. They accomplish this by using a custom Mesos plugin that allows developers to launch their own private Jenkins instances.^[22]

Apple announced in April 2015 that its Siri service uses its own Mesos framework called Jarvis.^[23]

Verizon selected Mesosphere's DC/OS, which is based on open source Apache Mesos, for data center service orchestration in August 2015.^[24]

com/2015/11/introducing-paasta-an-open-platform-as-a-service.html|title=Introducing PaaSTA: An Open, Distributed, Platform as a Service|website=Yelp Engineering Blog|access-date=2016-07-12|date=November 2015}}</ref>

Software startup Mesosphere, Inc. sells the Datacenter Operating System (DC/OS), a distributed operating system based on Apache Mesos.^[25] In September 2015, Microsoft announced a commercial partnership with Mesosphere to build container scheduling and orchestration services for Microsoft Azure.^[26] In October 2015, Oracle announced support for Mesos through Oracle Container Cloud Service.^[27]

• Dominant resource fairness – the resource-sharing policy used in Mesos
• Kubernetes – container orchestration platform
• Docker Swarm – native clustering for Docker
• List of cluster management software
• Comparison of cluster software

• Official website
• Apache Mesos on GitHub