Best of MesosCon 2015

Hundreds of strategists and practitioners showed up for MesosCon in Seattle last week. Trailblazers like Apple, Paypal, Twitter and AirBnB shared some great developmental and operational experiences with a crowd of hundreds. The major tech players like IBM and Microsoft were there too, expanding their datacenter-scheduling strategies. The age of datacenter-as-computer is here, and it’s driving significant operational and organizational cost savings. In case you missed it, I assembled a few of the best slides from MesosCon talks.

Twitter’s Production Scale

Joe Smith (@yasumoto), Tech Lead and Aurora/Mesos SRE

Joe talks about Twitter’s deployment of Aurora and the advantages of their Mesos deployment.

More interestingly, he also goes over several operational lessons encountered in the wild that are definitely worth a read.

Developing Frameworks for Apache Mesos

Joe Stein (@allthingshadoop), CEO Elodina

Joe has been making frameworks on Mesos almost since it was released, so he gave a talk on how to put them together. His talk was followed up the next day by a workshop that went over the Mesos framework API and some examples. The API is fairly complex, so Mesosphere is making special effort to get people using it. There are good examples of frameworks in many languages in the Rendler repo. (Edit: I also made one — Memcached on Mesos)

Save Millions By Efficient Resource Utilization Through Mesos

Smarth Madan, Paypal

Smarth talked about the incredible cost savings being achieved at Paypal based on improved resource utilization (they reclaimed 40% unused CPUs from their deployed infrastructure!) and developer productivity.

The number of micro-services deployed at Paypal is growing incredibly quickly, which makes setting up a test environment very complicated. Mesos has helped automate this process by providing a way for developers to structure their dependencies and push button deploy working software.

Silence is Golden: Coordination-Oriented Systems Design

Peter Bailis, PHD Candidate, UC Berkeley

Peter’s research into minimizing coordination points was particularly well-met at the conference. He’s done some research that shows that it’s possible to reduce coordination in many systems by 80+%, greatly increasing the scalability of such systems.

All in all it was a great conference, and Must Win was encouraged to see the traction Mesos is starting to gather. It’s a tool we’ve enjoyed deploying at Cisco, and we’ll definitely be looking for more places to put it into action.

Want to give Mesos a shot within your company? Reach out to Must Win.
We can handle deployment, management and custom framework development.

Mike Ihbe is a founding partner ofThe Must Win All Star Web & Mobile Consultancy.

Mike is an expert in a dizzying array of technologies and has loads of experience managing fast-moving dev teams, designing systems, and scaling large applications. When not on the job, he can be found cooking delicious meals on ski slopes in exotic locales.