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Apache Mesos Essentials

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Apache Mesos Essentials

230 pages, Paperback

First published June 17, 2015

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Dharmesh Kakadia

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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
172 reviews19 followers
January 10, 2018
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.
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151 reviews
December 12, 2015
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!
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December 26, 2015
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.
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