Container orchestration is a fast-growing technology. There are currently 3 industry giants; Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and Apache Mesos. They fall into the category of DevOps infrastructure management tools called “container orchestration engines.” Docker Swarm has won the hearts of customers and has become the first choice for containerization. Kubernetes and Mesos are the main competitors. What is the difference between Kubernetes and Mesos? In this regard, they have much more to offer. They offer different availability gradients with a number of evolving features.
Which is better Kubernetes or Mesos? Despite Docker Swarm’s popularity, it also has some drawbacks and limited features:
- Docker Swarm is platform-dependent.
- Docker Swarm doesn’t offer efficient storage options.
- Docker Swarm has limited fault tolerance.
- Docker Swarm monitoring is insufficient.
These shortcomings have led to the question, “How do you choose the right container management and orchestration tool?” Many companies are now opting for alternatives to Docker Swarm. That’s where Kubernetes and Mesos come in. To systematically examine this choice, it is essential to look at the core competencies of the two options, as well as the differences between Kubernetes and Mesos. As a result, one can draw independently informed conclusions.
Features of Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesos
| features | Docker Swarm | Kubernetes | Mesos/Marathon |
| Initial release date | March 2013, July 2019 stable | July 2015, September 2019 v1.16 | July 2016, stable August 2019 |
| deploy | Based on YAML | Based on YAML | Unique format |
| stable | Relatively new and evolving | Quite mature and stable, constantly updated | ripe |
| Design Concept | Based on Docker | Pod-based grouping of resources | Linux-based Cgroups and Control Groups |
| Supported images | docker-image format | Limited support for Docker and rkt | Docker is mainly supported |
| Learning curve | Simple | steep | steep |
Which is better, Kubernetes or Mesos
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes was first released in June 2014, also known as k8s. It is Google’s container orchestration platform for cloud-native computing. In terms of functionality, Kubernetes is one of the available native integration options. It also has a huge community behind it. Google uses Kubernetes for its container-as-a-service offering, rebranding it Google Container Engine. Other platforms that extend support for Kubernetes include Microsoft Azure and Red Hat OpenShift. It also supports Docker and uses a YAML-based deployment model.
What is the difference between Kubernetes and Mesos? Kubernetes’ architecture is built on a modular API core, allowing vendors to integrate systems around their proprietary technology. It does a great job of providing application developers with powerful tools for Docker container orchestration and open-source projects.
What is Apache Mesos?
The roots of Apache Mesos can be traced back to 2009 with a Ph.D. Students first developed it at the University of California, Berkeley. Compared to Kubernetes and Docker Swarm, it takes a more distributed approach to managing data center and cloud resources.
Kubernetes vs. Mesos Differences: It takes a modular approach when it comes to handling container management. It allows users to be flexible in terms of the type and scalability of the applications they can run. Mesos allows other container management frameworks to run on top of it. This includes Kubernetes, Apache Aurora, Mesosphere Marathon, and Chronos.
Mesos was created to solve many different challenges. One is to abstract data center resources into a pool. The other is to mix and match different workloads and automate the next day’s operations. Finally, provide evergreen scalability for running tasks and new applications. It has the unique ability to manage a variety of workloads individually, including application groups such as Java, stateless microservices, and more.
Container Management: Explained
Before we decide how to choose a container management tool, the concept of container management must be explained further.
Container management is the process of adding, organizing, and replacing a large number of software containers. It leverages software to automate the creation, deployment, and scaling of containers. Container management requires a platform to organize software containers, known as operating system-level virtualization. The platform optimizes efficiency and simplifies container delivery without the need for complex interdependent system architectures.
As more and more businesses use DevOps for faster development and their applications, containers have become very popular. Container management creates a need for container orchestration, which is a more specialized tool. It automates the deployment, management, network scaling, and availability of container-based applications.
Container Orchestration: Explained
Container orchestration refers to the automated process of managing or scheduling a single container for a microservices-based application in multiple clusters. It works with Kubernetes and Mesos. It also plans to deploy containers into a cluster, determining the best host for the containers.
Some of the reasons why you need a container orchestration framework include:
- Configure and schedule containers
- Container availability
- Container provisioning and deployment
- Container configuration
- Container scaling applications for load balancing
- Container health monitoring
- Secure interactions between containers
How do I choose a container management and orchestration tool?
Which is better Kubernetes or Mesos? There are many variables to consider when deciding how to effectively implement container management and orchestration. The final choice will depend on the specific requirements of the user. Some of them are briefly explained below.
- CNI networking: A good tool should allow for negligible network connections between services. This is to avoid developers having to spend time looking for dependencies on special-purpose code.
- Simplicity: The tools used should be as easy to implement as possible.
- Active development: The chosen tool should have a development team that provides regular updates to users. This is due to the evolving nature of container orchestration.
- Cloud provider: The tool you choose should not be tied to any single cloud provider.
Note: Container orchestration is just one example of the workloads that can be run with Mesos’ modular architecture. This specialized choreography framework is called Marathon. It was originally developed to orchestrate application archives in Linux cgroup containers, and later expanded support for Docker containers in 2014.
What is the difference between Kubernetes and Mesos?
Kubernetes and Mesos have different approaches to the same problem. Kubernetes acts as a container orchestrator, while Apache Mesos works like a cloud operating system. As a result, there are some fundamental differences between the two, which are highlighted in the table below.
| Differences | Kubernetes | Apache Mesos |
| Application Definitions | Kubernetes is a combination of replica sets, replication controllers, pods, and certain services and deployments. Here, a “pod” refers to a set of containers that sit in the same location, which is considered to be an atomic unit of deployment. | Mesos’ application group is modeled as an n-pronged tree, with the group branching and the application being a leaf. It is used to divide multiple applications into manageable collections, where components are deployed in the order of dependencies. |
| usability | Pods are distributed across worker nodes. | Applications are distributed among slave nodes. |
| Load balancing | Pods are exposed through a service that acts as a load balancer. | The application can be accessed through a proxy load balancer, i.e., Mesos-DNS. |
| reserve | There are two Stage APIs. The first provides abstraction for a single storage backend such as NFS, AWS, and EBS. The second provides an abstraction for storage resource requests. This is achieved through a different storage backend. | Marathon containers have the ability to use persistent volumes, which are local to the node that created them. Therefore, the container always needs to run on said node. The experimental Flocker integration is responsible for supporting persistent volumes that are not local to a single node. |
| Network model | Kubernetes’ networking model allows any pod to communicate with any service or other pod. It requires two separate networks to function, neither of which needs to be connected from outside the cluster. This is achieved by deploying an overlay network on the cluster nodes. | Marathon’s Docker integration allows container ports to be mapped to hose ports, which is a finite resource. Here, the container doesn’t automatically get the IP, which is only possible by integrating with Calico. It is important to note that multiple containers cannot share the same network namespace. |
| Purpose of use | It is ideal for newcomers to the cluster world, providing a quick, easy, and hassle-free way to start their cluster-oriented development journey. It offers a great degree of versatility and portability and is supported by a handful of well-known vendors such as Microsoft and IBM. | It is ideal for large systems as it is designed for maximum redundancy. For existing workloads such as Hadoop or Kafka, Mesos provides a framework that allows users to interleaved these workloads. It is a more stable platform and at the same time relatively complex to use. |
| Suppliers and developers | Kubernetes is used by several companies and developers and is supported by several other platforms, such as Red Hat OpenShift and Microsoft Azure. | Mesos is supported by large organizations such as Twitter, Apple, and Yelp. It has a steep learning curve and is quite complex because of its core focus on big data and analytics. |
What is the difference between Kubernetes and Mesos
Comparison of Kubernetes and Mesos
Kubernetes and Mesos take different strategies to solve the same problem. When comparing them based on several features, we found that the two solutions are equivalent in terms of features and other benefits compared to Docker Swarm.
Which is better Kubernetes or Mesos? We can conclude that they are both viable options for container management and orchestration. Each tool can effectively manage docker containers. They both provide access to container orchestration for application portability and scalability.
When dealing with legacy systems and large-scale cluster environments via DC/OS, Mesos’ intuitive architectural design provides a great choice. It is also good at dealing with more specific technologies, such as distributed processing with Hadoop. Development teams looking to build systems specifically for docker container orchestration prefer Kubernetes.
Our direct comparison should give users a clear picture of Kubernetes vs. Mesos and their core competencies. The goal is to provide readers with relevant data and facts to inform their decision.
