Apache Mesos vs. Google Kubernetes Engine

Mesos is really great when you have a big datacenter with many different applications and use cases. It will help you to optimize the resource usage, being a centralized API for your infrastructure. It will not suit well for small companies that just need to deploy a web app. In this case, I would recommend something smaller.

Incentivized

Google Kubernetes Engine is well suited for dynamic and large workloads since it can scale up with usage. It is easily configurable, which allows for flexibility. User interface is simple to navigate, which reduces roadblocks for a team with people unfamiliar with Kubernetes. Great if you are already using other GCP services as it integrates well with that.

Incentivized

• Mesos may have many frameworks. If you have Mesos installed on your servers, you may use it for many kinds of tasks. Today we're running only web applications but the idea is to install a different framework for big data soon.
• There is a good community growing around it.

Incentivized

• Deployment of a new GKE cluster is really fast in comparison to other cloud providers.
• GCP is ahead other vendors and always provide the most up to date Kubernetes version.
• GKE automation for master upgrade and the worker nodes pool works really well.

Incentivized

• Unreliable deployments that would fail for no good reason. Sometimes our Docker container would be "restarting" forever because Mesos thought it didn't have enough resources to start the container.
• Impossibly slow UI. Built in React under the hood with a lot of bloatware backed in, so loading the Mesos UI on a slow internet connection was painful.
• No real logging solution - it would stream "console.log()" output to the UI, but searching for logs wasn't really possible without downloading a huge file.
• No built-in support for redeploying containers from a CI. We had to create a service whose whole job was to expose an HTTP endpoint that restarted a container, and then made Circle CI ping the endpoint whenever we wanted to redeploy.

Incentivized

• Not as intuitive as it could be
• Documentation could be better, especially for people using other Google Cloud tools
• Not the preferred Kubernetes Engine for many apps

Incentivized

It's a great product if you learn it. It has flexibility and is very strong. Autoscaling and Resource management make running huge applications a breeze. Using Helm with Kubernetes and Terraform for infrastructure creation can totally automate your CICD pipeline. You also get easy access to CUDA cores for machine learning.

Incentivized

No real support channel, the Mesos GitHub issues list was the only one we found and it wasn't particularly helpful.

Incentivized

Google support is excellent and helpful, but the first answer is always so bureaucratic no matter how many logs, evidence, and information you sent.

Incentivized

Kubernetes is by far the best choice. More reliable and better developer experience. Mesos is prone to sporadic failures and not really designed to handle CI/CD-based deployments. Docker Cloud once shut down our entire cluster for "upgrades" without giving us any warning.

Incentivized

We had to move several products to Google Cloud, and the Google Kubernetes Engine was the option recommended to us, so we investigated it and ran with it. Back then (2019), we were not aware of Cloud Run-provisioned K8s clusters, so our other option was a completely self-managed K8s cluster on Compute Engine VMs, which we did not have the knowledge of and capacity to handle.

Incentivized

• Developers needed to spend hours waiting to verify that their supposedly automated CD deploys actually went through.
• Lots of late night and early morning calls that Mesos deploys are hanging again.
• 10-20 hours spent building a custom service just to integrate Mesos with a CD provider.

Incentivized

• Compared to other big K8s providers it has the best price/performance factors.
• Upgrade process from stable to regular versions
• Old stable releases: 1.15/1.16 should be in a stable branch.

Incentivized