Kubernetes and Apache Mesos are major players in container orchestration. Let's take a look at how they compare to each other.
Kubernetes, Docker Swarm & Apache Mesos are the three big players in container orchestration. All three all fall into a class of DevOps infrastructure management tools that are also known as Container Orchestration Engines (COEs). Although Docker is considered standard for containerization, there are no clear winners in the orchestration space. Both Kubernetes and Mesos are widely used orchestration systems in the Docker community and provide a gradient of usability versus feature sets that are evolving with time.
Once you understand the difference between Kubernetes and Docker Swarm, the next step is to see how Kubernetes and Mesos fair against each other and how they complement each other.
A Brief Overview of Kubernetes
Kubernetes was designed by Google from scratch to orchestrate Docker containers - the goal was to empower application developers, provide a standard deployment interface, and build on a Modular API core that allows vendors to integrate systems around the core Kubernetes technology. It is basically a cluster management tool for Docker containers. Kubernetes aids in scheduling and deploying a large number of containers replicas onto a node cluster. Since it's an open-source model, Kubernetes can run almost anywhere, and all the major players in public cloud providers offer easy ways to utilize this technology.
A Brief Overview of Apache Mesos
Initiated as a UC Berkeley project, Mesos was created as a next-generation cluster manager. It is open source software that provides efficient resource isolation and sharing across distributed applications or frameworks. Mesos is a distributed systems kernel, with a full API for programming directly against the datacenter. Mesos architecture consists of a master process that manages slave daemons running on each cluster node, and frameworks that run tasks on these slaves.
Mesos gained popularity and was immediately adopted by Twitter, Apple (Siri), Yelp, Uber, Netflix, and many other prominent names in the technology world to support everything from micro-services, big data and real-time analytics, to elastic scaling.
