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Mesos compute cluster for data centers

Distributed!

Article from ADMIN 27/2015

By Udo Seidel

The Apache Mesos free cluster framework is a powerful tool for distributed computing in data centers.

The Mesos cluster framework by Apache [1] has been around since 2009 and has attracted quite an impressive community, including heavyweights like eBay, Netflix, PayPal, and Twitter.

Mesos is a framework that helps use all of a data center's resources in the most efficient way possible. The Mesos framework extends the concept of a classical compute cluster, combining CPU, memory, storage, and other resources to form a single, distributed construct. Mesos distributes tasks that are typically handled by the operating system kernel. The Mesos developers thus describe Mesos as a distributed kernel for the data center.

The Story So Far

Like many open source projects, Mesos has a university background. Original developers included Ph.D. students Benjamin Hindman, Andy Konwinski, Matei Zaharia, and their professor Ion Stoica from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2009, Mesos was officially presented to the public [2]; at the time, the project went by the working title of Nexus. To avoid confusion with another project using the same name, it was renamed Mesos. Now, Mesos, which is written in C++ and released under the Apache license, is a top-level project of the Apache Foundation in the cloud category. The current version is Mesos 0.21.

Two years after the first release, the developers presented a far more advanced variant [3] at a 2011 Usenix conference. Twitter engineers had already been running Mesos for a year in their own IT infrastructure [4]. Some of the engineers had previously worked for Google and were familiar with its counterpart, which today goes by the name of Omega [5]. Since 2011, many prominent

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