Apache Mesos Essentials

by Dharmesh Kakadia

Apache Mesos is a cluster manager that provides efficient resource isolation and sharing across distributed applications, or frameworks. It allows developers to concurrently run the likes of Hadoop, Spark, Storm, and other applications on a dynamically shared pool of nodes. With Mesos, you have the power to manage a wide range of resources in a multi-tenant environment. Starting with the basics, this book will give you an insight into all the features that Mesos has to offer. You will first learn how to set up Mesos in various environments from data centers to the cloud. You will then learn how to implement self-managed Platform as a Service environment with Mesos using various service schedulers, such as Chronos, Aurora, and Marathon. You will then delve into the depths of Mesos fundamentals and learn how to build distributed applications using Mesos primitives. Finally, you will round things off by covering the operational aspects of Mesos including logging, monitoring, high availability, and recovery.

230 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 17, 2015

Reviews

[Senthil Kumaran · Rating 3 out of 5]

A simple overview of Mesos. It enlists the commands and scripts that will be useful to operate a Mesos cluster. Gives an overview of Hadoop and Spark data frameworks and how they can launched on Mesos. It is aimed at operators and system engineers trying to operate Mesos.

[John Mayers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nothing

[Jascha · Rating 2 out of 5]

Apache Mesos is usually referred to as the kernel of a data infrastructure. As such, it abstracts the resources made availabled by the nodes thus allowing the creation of fault-tolerant and elastic distributed systems, referred to as frameworks. While Mesos has been there since 2009, its popularity strongly increased this year as a consequence of the success Docker had, since the two technologies can work together smoothly and, among the many different ways to orchestrate that blue whale over a cluster, Apache Mesos certainly represents one of the best choices. Despite this, the titles dedicated to the subject are, sadly, less than two. True, the official documentation is well laid out and exhaustive, and the community very active and helpful. But yea, there is only one book currently dedicated to Apache Mesos: Apache Mesos Essentials, an introductory text that is meant to give the readers a quick taste of what can be achieved with it.

Released early this summer, Apache Mesos Essentials is a thin introduction to Mesos, the cluster management system first developed by the University of Berkley then by the Apache Foundation. The book spans through some seven chapters, most of which show how to configure Mesos with some other technology to get them to work together. But let's get a little more into the details.

The first thing that comes to the eyes is poor proofreading, something that, unfortunately, is not new to Packt Publishing. Not only articles are missing here and there, but sometimes entire sentences are semantically wrong. For example If the framework accepts a resource offer, the framework allocates the corresponding resourced to the framework and then the framework is free to use them. What a pity.

The first chapter briefly introduces Mesos and some basic concept. No details, just a quick overview. The reader is also guided through the installation steps, as typical of any book's first chapter. What follows, is a series of chapters, up until the sixth excluded, where the author couples Mesos with another technology, which can be Hadoop, Storm or Spark. The pattern is always the same: quick introduction to what this technology can do, its history and some of its key features. Next, how to install it and get it to work with Mesos. A couple of notes here: first of all, there are no real world examples. The author always relies on the examples that each technologies comes with, that is, the reader is presented with Hello World! like examples, nothing more complicated. Similarly, there are no real world architecture scenarios. Second, these chapters feel like a manual. The pages are plenty of configuration files, nothing else. Which is something that the official documentation(s) are there for.

Chapter 6 is certainly the best of the whole book and probably the only really worth reading. It gets into the internals of Mesos, explaining its different components. The whole thing is coupled with very clear and colorful diagrams that help the reader to get the overall picture.

To wrap it all up, despite being the only book dedicated to Apache Mesos out there, I do not recommend it. The only chapter worth a read does not provide anything that the official documentation does already. Hopefully, thanks to the popularity of Docker, more books dedicated to Mesos will be written and we will have better choices.

As usual, you can find more reviews on my personal blog: http://books.lostinmalloc.com. Feel free to pass by and share your thoughts!

[Korey Fort]

This book was not very good at all. The tutorials didn't seem well thought out at all. It felt more like a data dump than an actual book to set you up for future work with Mesos.