Apache Mesos vs Docker: What are the differences?

Introduction

Apache Mesos and Docker are both popular technologies used in containerization and resource management. While they serve similar purposes, there are key differences between them.

1. Resource Management: Apache Mesos is primarily a resource management platform, whereas Docker is a containerization platform. Mesos provides a distributed system for managing and allocating computing resources among applications, whereas Docker focuses on packaging applications into containers, allowing them to run consistently across different environments.

2. Multi-Tenancy: Mesos supports multi-tenancy, allowing multiple users or teams to share the same cluster while maintaining isolation between their applications. It provides fine-grained resource allocation and scheduling mechanisms to ensure fairness and prevent one application from monopolizing the resources. On the other hand, Docker does not inherently support multi-tenancy. It primarily focuses on single application deployment within a container.

3. Containerization Approach: Docker uses operating system-level virtualization to create lightweight and isolated containers, where each container runs as an independent process on the host operating system. Mesos, on the other hand, provides a higher level of abstraction by allowing different containerization technologies to run within it. It can support Docker containers, as well as other container runtimes like rkt and appc.

4. Scaling and Elasticity: Docker provides scaling capabilities through its swarm mode, which allows multiple Docker hosts to work together as a cluster. However, Mesos is specifically designed for scalable and elastic deployments. It supports auto-scaling of applications based on resource demand and can dynamically allocate and free resources as needed.

5. Service Discovery and Orchestration: Docker has built-in service discovery and orchestration capabilities, which allow containers to communicate with each other and coordinate their actions. Mesos, on the other hand, provides a framework called Marathon for managing long-running services and applications. Marathon can be used to automatically scale and monitor applications, providing more advanced orchestration features.

6. Community and Ecosystem: Docker has a large and vibrant community, with a vast ecosystem of tools and services built around it. It has become the de facto standard for containerization. Mesos also has a growing community and ecosystem, but it is more focused on resource management and distributed computing. Mesos is often used in conjunction with other containerization technologies like Docker to provide a comprehensive solution.

In summary, Apache Mesos is a resource management platform that supports multi-tenancy, various containerization technologies, and elastic deployments. Docker, on the other hand, is a containerization platform focused on packaging applications into containers and providing built-in service discovery and orchestration capabilities. Both technologies have their strengths and are often used together to create robust and scalable application deployments.