What are the best cluster managers?

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4

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16

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Oct 18, 2019

Last
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4 Options Considered

Best cluster managers	Price	Last Updated
-- Kubernetes	-	Sep 17, 2019
-- Nomad	-	Sep 17, 2019
-- Apache Mesos	-	Sep 15, 2019
-- Amazon EC2 Container Service	-	Apr 21, 2016

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score 5 · Answer 1

Kubernetes

Top Con

Complex Architecture

Compared to others Kubernetes has a lot of moving parts, which can all be reasons for downtime due to bugs or misconfiguration. See More

Top Pro

Open source

Kubernetes is free and open source. See More

Top Con

Rapid development makes this into a moving target

Currently it constantly needs maintenance. See More

Top Pro

Works well with modern operating systems

Kubernetes works very well with modern environments (such as CoreOS or Red Hat Atomc) which offer lightweight computing nodes that you don't have to manage, since they are managed for you. See More

Top Con

If used on an existing system, some re-organizing may be needed

Because of how opinionated Kubernetes is, it may be necessary to change some things if you decide to use Kubernetes as an orchestration tool in an existing application. See More

Top Pro

Supported on several PaaS

Kubernetes is currently supported by Google Compute Engine, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, and vSphere. Work is being done to support Kubernetes on OpenShift and CloudFoundry. See More

Top Pro

Great starting point for beginners

Kubernetes great for beginners who are just starting to work on clustering. It's probably the quickest and easiest way to start experimenting and learning cluster oriented development. See More

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score 3 · Answer 2

Nomad

Top Pro

Simple, minimal architecture

Being focused on one thing only also has its advantages. For one, Nomad is very simple architecturally. There's only a single binary for both clients and servers, it also does not need any external services for any coordination or storage. See More

Top Con

Only provides cluster management and scheduling

While other orchestration tools provide much more than just cluster management and scheduling (they also provide things like secrets management, discovery, monitoring, etc.), Nomad follows the Unix philosophy of doing only one thing and doing it well, providing only cluster management and scheduling. See More

Top Pro

Complex applications can easily be expressed through Nomad

Nomad uses a high-level abstraction of jobs. Jobs are essentially task groups (sets of tasks). Because of this, Nomad allows users to develop and manage complex applications easily, without having to think about the individual containers that make these applications. See More

Top Pro

Easy to reason about

Nomad gives a lot of output and is intentionally kept simple. This makes maintenance easy and reduces downtimes. See More

Top Pro

Big comapnies, like eBay and CircleCI use it

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score 3 · Answer 3

Apache Mesos

Top Pro

Good for existing workloads

If you have existing workloads, for example (Hadoop, Kafka, Spark, etc), Mesos makes it very easy to use these workloads together. See More

Top Con

May be over-complicated for small clusters

When working with small clusters (less than a dozen nodes), Mesos may be an over-complicated solution since it's rather low level and designed for large clusters and scaling. See More

Top Pro

Good with data processing applications

Many modern data processing applications (Hadoop, Kafka, Spark) run very well on Mesos. This is especially nice because they can all be run on the same resource pool, along with new container packaged apps. See More

Top Pro

Scales very well

Mesos is a battle-proven piece of software which has been used in many large-scale projects (it's used by Twitter, Ebay and AirBnB) and can support hundreds of thousands of nodes. See More

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score 1 · Answer 4

Amazon EC2 Container Service

Top Pro

Separates scheduling logic from state management

One of the core principles on which ECS is built is the separation of scheduling logic from state management. This way, you can choose to use the ECS schedulers, write your own or even integrate third-party schedulers. See More

Top Con

You have to manually prescale a cluster

Initially you have to create the EC2 instances that you wish to put in your ECS cluster, using the AMI so that they have the ECS agent on them. However, you have to prescale that specific cluster manually after that. See More

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What are the best cluster managers?

4 Options Considered

Kubernetes

My Recommendation for Kubernetes

My Recommendation for Kubernetes

Complex Architecture

Open source

Rapid development makes this into a moving target

Works well with modern operating systems

If used on an existing system, some re-organizing may be needed

Supported on several PaaS

Great starting point for beginners

Nomad

My Recommendation for Nomad

My Recommendation for Nomad

Simple, minimal architecture

Only provides cluster management and scheduling

Complex applications can easily be expressed through Nomad

Easy to reason about

Big comapnies, like eBay and CircleCI use it

Apache Mesos

My Recommendation for Apache Mesos

My Recommendation for Apache Mesos

Good for existing workloads

May be over-complicated for small clusters

Good with data processing applications

Scales very well

Amazon EC2 Container Service

My Recommendation for Amazon EC2 Container Service

My Recommendation for Amazon EC2 Container Service

Separates scheduling logic from state management

You have to manually prescale a cluster

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