AWS OpsWorks vs Mesosphere: What are the differences?

What is AWS OpsWorks? Model and manage your entire application from load balancers to databases using Chef. Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component .

What is Mesosphere? Combine your datacenter servers and cloud instances into one shared pool. Mesosphere offers a layer of software that organizes your machines, VMs, and cloud instances and lets applications draw from a single pool of intelligently- and dynamically-allocated resources, increasing efficiency and reducing operational complexity.

AWS OpsWorks belongs to "Server Configuration and Automation" category of the tech stack, while Mesosphere can be primarily classified under "Cluster Management".

Some of the features offered by AWS OpsWorks are:

• AWS OpsWorks lets you model the different components of your application as layers in a stack, and maps your logical architecture to a physical architecture. You can see all resources associated with your application, and their status, in one place.
• AWS OpsWorks provides an event-driven configuration system with rich deployment tools that allow you to efficiently manage your applications over their lifetime, including support for customizable deployments, rollback, partial deployments, patch management, automatic instance scaling, and auto healing.
• AWS OpsWorks lets you define template configurations for your entire environment in a format that you can maintain and version just like your application source code.

On the other hand, Mesosphere provides the following key features:

• Built on top of open source technology
• Grow to tens of thousands of nodes effortlessly while dynamically allocating resources with ease.
• Mesosphere keeps your apps running by rebalancing resources and restarting failed tasks automatically.

"Devops" is the top reason why over 27 developers like AWS OpsWorks, while over 5 developers mention "Devops" as the leading cause for choosing Mesosphere.

According to the StackShare community, AWS OpsWorks has a broader approval, being mentioned in 73 company stacks & 19 developers stacks; compared to Mesosphere, which is listed in 12 company stacks and 8 developer stacks.