Unfortunately, Mesosphere is no longer focusing on Marathon as an Apache Mesos framework and is instead integrating it into DC/OS, their commercial offering. Open-source Mesos+Marathon no longer appears to be an option.
(I am a Mesosphere employee.)
I'm afraid I don't know what the plans are for the project (not working on Marathon myself) but being the most popular open source project run and maintained by Mesosphere, I have no doubt that we will continue adding new features and functionality.
If you are searching for a product in this space, then K8s is the way to go. It has a huge community.
If, on the other hand, you are looking for a small, non-monolithic, resource scheduler + some basic frameworks (i.e. Apache Mesos + Marathon) then DC/OS is not that.
But since Mesosphere are no longer supporting working on Marathon outside of DC/OS, or indeed any framework outside of DC/OS, the Mesos/Marathon is effectively dead, since, while Mesos is open source, the only major supporter of frameworks for it is Mesosphere, and you wont get them unless you use DC/OS.
For some relatively small projects, k8s is sufficient. But pretty quickly you end up needing more and more functionality and you end up in a larger stack like OpenShift.
That's the place that Mesos and DC/OS (IMHO) shine: when you're working with large clusters (1000+) running very different workloads. Because in that scenario, k8s is still pretty immature and you're going to inevitably need to solve all the other problems that OpenShift, DC/OS, Rancher or other stacks solve. Just like Linux distros, in theory, anyone can do it. In practice, it's a pain and you want to pick up a standard distro. That's what these stacks provide: a pre-configured suite of open source tools that get you way more than k8s or Mesos or Marathon on their own provide.
And again, if you are going to be running DC/OS at that scale, then you are going to be running the enterprise version, because you aren't going to be running that much magical shit on million dollar hardware without someone being paid to troubleshoot.
That might be me in a few years, except that Mesosphere seems to be attempting to kill me in the short term by killing non-DC/OS mesos/marathon while crippling non-enterprise DC/OS. So looks like we'll be migrating to K8s and hoping that in a few years K8s scales. The "K8s doesn't scale" argument is losing ground with every new release btw.
Disclaimer: I work at Mesosphere.
Disclaimer: I work for MS
Source: I worked on the team, although we had talked about this at mesoscon in the past.
Of course you are right that in DC/OS there is a lot more besides Mesos that could fail at scale. That is why we are carefully scale-testing DC/OS in its entirety -- under lab conditions (internally) as well as under real-world conditions (large production environments). We will be more transparent about this in the future, but one example I can give is that we regularly run DC/OS on 10^3 nodes for testing purposes.
> if you are going to be running DC/OS at that scale, then you are going to be running the enterprise version
I am not convinced by that argument. Still, just to clarify, Mesosphere Enterprise DC/OS does not have better scaling characteristics than (open) DC/OS. We are trying to land all corresponding goodness in DC/OS.
> killing non-DC/OS mesos/marathon
I understand that brutal decisions have been made. But if you look at Mesos and Marathon as of today (btw., there is no such thing as "non-DC/OS mesos/marathon"), progress is being made at an impressive rate. I observe more "animating" than "killing".
> while crippling non-enterprise DC/OS
I only see additions, no removals. Also, if you were looking at the core technology stack, the delta between Enterprise DC/OS and DC/OS will probably appear to be surprisingly small to you.
> The "K8s doesn't scale" argument is losing ground with every new release btw.
I agree.
The "scale argument" is insignificant compared to other aspects in most of the cases anyway. As we all know :-).
Marathon isn't the only scheduler - Twitter (and some others) have been using Aurora (http://aurora.apache.org/). Currently we are deployed on Mesos/Marathon, and originally I thought Aurora may become more popular because it was Apache "blessed".
There are three ways to install it: 1) Cloud provider specific templates (e.g. CloudFormation / Azure Resource Manager. GCP support is on the backlog)
2) The ssh installer (this has a UI and a CLI). I believe this doesn't work well for larger installations because of the one to many issue.
3) The advanced install method. This generates a binary that is copied to each node. You can integrate this with Puppet, Chef, Ansible and so on.
https://dcos.io/install/ and https://dcos.io/docs/ has more details on this.
>Dear Marathon Community,
...
>Because of our focus on integrating the experience of using Marathon and DC/OS, we aren’t planning on updating the old UI further.
And by "old UI" they mean the one that works without DC/OS.
So there is no Apache Mesos + Marathon. There's Mesos. With no actively developed frameworks (Chronos is dead too). And then there's DC/OS.
Marathon is still being developed as an open source Mesos framework. The _UI_ is going to stall out a bit, but it's just the UI.
Chronos is still being developed, but Mesosphere is taking Metronome and folding it into Marathon, making it more like Aurora. Moreover there's Singularity, PaaSTA, and a whole lot more:
http://mesos.apache.org/documentation/latest/frameworks/
Yes, DC/OS is intended to be a (mostly) full stack, but even then, it's still just Mesos under the hood and you can run any Mesos framework on it. The open source edition of DC/OS is fairly full featured, while the enterprise version gives you better account security, networking and integrated secrets (vault) support.
Jaaron: "The _UI_ is going to stall out a bit, but its just the UI."
My options are:
a) running latest marathon backend without the user interface
b) running latest marathon backend and clone/maintain the user interface
c) migrate the whole thing to enterprise DC/OS (since I need authentication)
d) migrate to K8s
I view the lack of option "(e) keep using marathon-the-product as it is now", as a breach of trust, so (c) is off the table (whereas, before, it was my expected endpoint). YMMV.
We have to support the company first which has a more integrated solution that actually has to make money at the end of the day. We are also a pretty damn small team with a huge backlog to deliver, so it sucks that we had to abandon the UI outside of DCOS. We hope that the components of the DCOS UI for marathon can become the native UI for marathon, but again, it's a balance of priorities.
Marathon by itself has a lot more coming in the future, some will be restricted to DCOS, but not everything, it's a balancing act. Given our history of changing course publicaly (I wasn't involved in these decisions), I'm waiting to share our plans for 1.5 until I'm confident we're committing to them.
Just a quick two cents.
I wish you had forked it. If you're resource constrained and need to meet goals for LargeCorp, then fork the entire front-end/back-end. The approach of just ditching the UI half of the app while you iterate the same backend but with the DC/OS UI is really what's causing the grief here.