
The Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System Enters GA - mdevilliers
https://mesosphere.com/blog/2015/06/09/the-mesosphere-datacenter-operating-system-is-now-generally-available/
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steve0ps
I like the idea they present in the post: "We want to let users build and
deploy applications whose components span entire datacenters, but with the
simplicity of programming for a single machine." Unfortunately in my
experience that isn't a reality. DCOS / Marathon do not provide the necessary
components to really make this feasible. Sure your operations team can tie in
Mesos-DNS / Bamboo / Consul / whatever else, but that completely negates the
statement, while also requiring a specialized team. Even when tying in these
third party tools, it is likely you will have to make significant code updates
to utilize features such as service-discovery / SRV records.

It seems like Mesosphere's real innovation is a wrapper around Mesos with a
pretty UI sitting on top. Many operations teams will still require standing up
their own environment to install necessary packages for compliance, etc. At
that point what makes the DCOS install easier than Mesos? By creating this
wrapper around Mesos, it seems like the issue they present: "needing a team of
distributed systems experts", is simply changed to needing a team of DCOS /
Marathon experts. Having a team of DCOS experts will not replace your
operations team.

In my opinion most of the selling points mentioned in the article are really
Mesos benefits, rather than anything DCOS itself provides. The image in the
article with features of the Enterprise Edition only really provides 3
benefits over Mesos itself:

* Platinum 24x7x365 support (which is hopefully better than what I've experienced thus far with Marathon) * Emergency Patches * Professional Training

I am not sure why teams would pay for an annual per-node Enterprise Edition of
DCOS when they are just as capable of deploying Mesos themselves. Either way
they are ending up with a hobbled-together system needing serious support from
an operations team.

