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The Aurora Mesos Framework

Cloud Watcher

Article from ADMIN 28/2015

By Udo Seidel

Apache Aurora is a service daemon built for the data center.

Apache's Mesos project is an important building block for a new generation of cloud applications. The goal of the Mesos project is to let the developer "program against the datacenter, like it's a single pool of resources. 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" [1].

An important tool that has evolved out of the Mesos environment is Aurora, which recently graduated from the Apache Incubator and is now a full Apache project Figure 1. According to the project website,, "Aurora runs applications and services across a shared pool of machines, and is responsible for keeping them running, forever. When machines experience failure, Aurora intelligently reschedules those jobs onto healthy machines" [2]. In other words, Aurora is a little like an init tool for data centers and cloud-based virtual environments.

Figure 1: Aurora is a Mesos Framework; Mesos is in turn an Apache project.

The Aurora project has many fathers: In addition to its kinship with Apache and Mesos, Aurora was initially supported by Twitter, and Google was at least indirectly an

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