Are there any particular features or patches that are required? I maintain the Mesos package in NixOS, along with our patches for Ubuntu Fan Networking, and I would be interested in playing around with this.
2. What is the maximum limit on active connection?
2. This is a complicated question. You don't pay minuteman for active connections, only at connection construction time. You are reliant on netfilter's conntrack capabilities. By default these are built for 100s of thousands of connections. Given that in DC/OS this runs on every client, we are fairly confident in this approach, though conntrack could reasonably scale to millions of connections.
Although we changed the architecture, we decided to stick with Minuteman. Mesosphere's naming scheme has historically had to do with space. The road to the stars was originally paved by programs such as Minuteman -- Our mission is to orchestrate the data center. You can't do that without networking. Minuteman is our first networking component of many as one of the first components to help pave our way.