Updated on 10th of April 2021: The decision to move Apache Mesos to Attic, has been reversed.
An end of an era. What’s the better way to summarize that the maintainers of Apache Mesos are now voting on moving the project to Apache Attic. Attic is a place where Apache projects go when they reach end of life.
In other words: it’s end of the road for Apache Mesos.
I was first introduced to Mesos in 2015, back at Technicolor Virdata. A colleague, Nathan, has been going on about for a long time. I was tasked to help him move our Virdata platform to Mesos. It was the first time I was exposed to distributed scheduling. If I recall correctly, it took us about a couple of weeks to get our heads around it. We had to work out the installation and configuration process, figure out how to deploy Marathon. DC/OS did not exist yet.
Took us another two weeks to have the platform migrated. I have fond memories of nights spent trying to run Apache Spark on Mesos with Docker bridge networking…
It was great, such a big improvement over thousands of lines of Chef which we could start deprecating.
So yeah, end of an era. Mesos was great but I do feel it was a bit mismanaged. Not by the community though, the community put an awesome effort into maintaining it for such a long time.
It’s now between Kubernetes and HashiCorp Nomad to figure it out. What’s positive, they’re solving the same problem but serve different audiences.
Great to have a choice.