Apache Mesos is a cluster manager that abstracts and shares hardware resources across distributed applications and frameworks running on a pool of nodes.
Mesos solves the problem of efficiently allocating compute resources in heterogeneous clusters where multiple frameworks need to coexist and share the same infrastructure. It works by acting as a resource broker between the physical cluster and the frameworks that consume those resources. Rather than assigning dedicated machines to each framework, Mesos dynamically offers available resources to frameworks, which then decide whether to accept or reject those offers. This two-level scheduling approach allows frameworks like Hadoop, Spark, Jenkins, and Aurora to run side-by-side on the same hardware while maintaining isolation and preventing resource contention.
Mesos suits organizations running multiple distributed computing frameworks that need to maximize hardware utilization and simplify cluster operations. It is particularly valuable when you have diverse workloads—batch processing, stream processing, long-running services, and scheduled jobs—that would otherwise require separate dedicated clusters. The tool is appropriate for teams with the operational expertise to manage a distributed system and the scale where resource sharing becomes a significant cost concern. Mesos provides fine-grained resource isolation through containerization and supports both stateless and stateful frameworks, making it flexible across different application types.
The project maintains active user and development mailing lists with archived discussions available for reference. Documentation is included in the repository and rendered on the project website, with a dedicated getting started guide for new users. The codebase is written in C++ and distributed under the Apache License.
