Building Applications on Mesos

Chapter 7. The Future of Mesos

Mesos has come a long way. It started out as a graduate student project at the University of California, Berkley, but since then, it’s been rolled out in production across hundreds of thousands of machines, attracting scores of developers to its ecosystem. We’ve learned about building applications on Mesos today, but where is Mesos going? In this chapter, we’ll look at several current initiatives in the Mesos ecosystem that stand to become critical and valuable features of Mesos.

Multitenant Workloads

Before we discuss multitenancy, let’s look at a motivating problem: noisy neighbors. Noisy neighbors are a problem in real life as well as in distributed systems with multiple users (tenants). When an apartment building’s walls are too thin, you can hear your neighbors blaring music through the walls. Analogously, when a system doesn’t provide sufficient isolation (i.e., thick walls), your application’s performance can be adversely affected by other applications running on the same machine. For example, multiple CPU-intensive applications running on the same machine could all compete to use every CPU, resulting in reduced overall performance. As a result, it’s hard for the users or cluster operators to predict the performance of their applications—whereas if those applications were running in containers, they’d each be guaranteed a share of the CPU, reducing the unpredictability of their performance.

Multitenancy refers to when a single resource (in ...