We would like to propose Mesos as an incubator proposal.
Mesos is a resource manager for clusters that provides resource sharing and
isolation across distributed applications like Apache Hadoop, MPI, or web
applications. It started as a research project at UC Berkeley, but is now being
used both by other Berkeley groups and at Twitter. We open sourced Mesos in
August and would like to grow a broader community around it.
Our proposal is included below and available on the wiki at
http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/MesosProposal. We look forward to hearing
feedback and questions on the proposal. Also, let us know if you're interested
in being a mentor.
Thanks,
Matei Zaharia, Benjamin Hindman, Andy Konwinski, and Ali Ghodsi
= Abstract =
Mesos is a cluster manager that provides resource sharing and
isolation across cluster applications.
= Proposal =
Mesos is system for sharing resources between cluster applications such
as Hadoop MapReduce, HBase, MPI, and web applications.
It is motivated by three use cases. First, organizations that use
several of these applications can use Mesos to share nodes between them,
increasing utilization and simplifying management. Second, inspired by
MapReduce, a wide array of new cluster programming frameworks are being
proposed, such as Apache Hama, Microsoft Dryad, and Google's Pregel and
Caffeine. Mesos provides a common interface for such frameworks to share
resources, allowing organizations to use multiple frameworks in the same
cluster. Third, Mesos allows users of a framework such as Hadoop to have
multiple instances of the framework on the same cluster, facilitating
workload isolation and incremental deployment of upgrades.
= Background =
Mesos was inspired by operational issues experienced in large Apache Hadoop
deployments as well as a desire to provide a management system for a
wider range of cluster applications. The Apache Hadoop community has long
realized that the current model of having one instance of MapReduce
control a whole cluster leads to problems with isolation (one job may
cause the master to crash, killing all the other jobs), scalability,
and software upgrades (an upgrade must be deployed on the whole cluster).
Statically partitioning resources into multiple fixed-size MapReduce clusters
is unattractive because it lowers both utilization and data locality.
The community has discussed a two-level scheduling model where a simple,
robust low-level layer enables multiple applications to launch tasks
(https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MAPREDUCE-279). Mesos is such a layer,
with the additional goal of supporting non-Hadoop applications as well.
Mesos started as a research project at UC Berkeley, but is now being
tested at several companies (including Twitter and Facebook), and has attracted
interest from other industry users and researchers as well. We are
therefore proposing to place Mesos in the Apache incubator and build an
open source community around it.
= Rationale =
Although a variety of cluster schedulers (e.g. Torque, Sun Grid Engine)
already exist in the scientific computing community, they are not well
suited for today's data center environment.
These schedulers generally give jobs coarse-grained static allocations of
the cluster (e.g. X nodes for the full duration of the job).
This is problematic because many cluster applications are elastic
(can scale up and down), so utilization is not optimal under static
partitioning, and because data-intensive applications such as MapReduce
need to run a few tasks on every node of the cluster to read data locally.
To address these challenges, Mesos is designed around two principles:
* Fine-grained sharing: Mesos allocates resources at the level of "tasks"
within a job, allowing applications to scale up and down over time and
to take turns accessing data on cluster nodes.
* Application-controlled scheduling: Applications control which nodes
their tasks run on, allowing them to achieve placement goals such as
data locality.
In addition to these principles, Mesos is designed to be simple, scalable
and robust, becuase a cluster manager must be highly available to support
applications and should not become a bottleneck. Application-controlled
scheduling already simplifies our design by pushing much of the complex
logic of tracking job state to applications. In addition, Mesos employs an
optimized C++ message-passing library to achieve scalability and supports
master failover using Apache ZooKeeper.
Mesos already supports running Hadoop and MPI. We plan to add support
for other systems as requested (and contributed) by the community.
= Current Status =
== Meritocracy ==
Our intent with this incubator proposal is to start building a diverse
developer community around Mesos following the Apache meritocracy model.
We have wanted to make the project open source and encourage contributors
from multiple organizations from the start. We plan to provide plenty
of support to new developers and to quickly recruit those who make solid
contributions to committer status.
== Community ==
Mesos is currently being used by developers at Twitter and researchers in
computer science and civil engineering at Berkeley. We hope to extend the user
and developer base further in the future. The current developers and users
are all interested in building a solid open source community around Mesos.
To work towards an open source community, we have been using the GitHub issue
tracker and mailing lists at Berkeley for development discussions within our
group for several months now.
== Core Developers ==
Mesos was started by three graduate students at UC Berkeley (Benjamin Hindman,
Andy Konwinski and Matei Zaharia), who were soon joined by a postdoc from
the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (Ali Ghodsi). Although started as
a research project, Mesos was always intended to solve operational issues
with large clusters and to become an open-source project, building on our
successful experience doing research that has been incorporated into Apache
Hadoop
(several scheduling algorithms).
== Alignment ==
The ASF is a natural host for Mesos given that it is already the home of
Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra, and other emerging cloud software projects.
Mesos was designed to support Hadoop from the beginning in order to solve
operational challenges in Hadoop clusters, and it aims to support a wide range
of applications beyond Hadoop as well. Mesos complements the existing Apache
cloud computing projects by providing a unified way to manage these systems
and to share resources and data between them.
= Known Risks =
== Orphaned Products ==
With the current core developers of Mesos being graduate students, there
is a risk that these developers will eventually move on to other projects.
However, because of the broad scope of Mesos, we all plan to continue working
on projects related to it in the next several years. We are also actively
working with developers at other organizations, such as Twitter, who are
good candidates to become contributors.
== Inexperience with Open Source ==
All of the core developers are active users and followers of open source.
Matei Zaharia is a Hadoop committer and has experience with the Apache
infrastructure and development process. Andy Konwinski has contributed
patches to Hadoop through the Apache infrastructure as well. Ali Ghodsi
has released open source software as part of his PhD work that was adopted
by a Swedish company.
== Homogeneous Developers ==
The current core developers are all researchers (graduate students and a
young professor). However, we hope to establish a developer community
that includes contributors from several corporations, and we are already
working towards this with Twitter and Facebook.
== Reliance on Salaried Developers ==
Given that the project started in an academic research environment, the
core developers are all interested in it primarily for its own sake rather
than for the sake of employment. We all intend to continue working on Mesos
as volunteers.
== Relationships with Other Apache Products ==
Mesos needs to work well with Hadoop, HBase, and other cloud software
projects. Being hosted on the same infrastructure will facilitate this
and ultimately help out both Mesos and the projects that can now be
managed using it. There is, however, a risk that new projects will be built
to run solely on Mesos, introducing a dependency.
== An Excessive Fascination with the Apache Brand ==
While we respect the reputation of the Apache brand and have no doubts that
it will attract contributors and users, our interest is primarily to give
Mesos a solid home as an open source project following an established
development model. Locating the project in Apache will also facilitate
collaboration with Hadoop, HBase, and other Apache cluster computing projects,
as discussed in the Alignment section.
= Documentation =
Information about Mesos can be found at http://mesos.berkeley.edu.
The following sources may be useful to start with:
* Documentation for GitHub release: http://github.com/mesos/mesos/wiki
* Presentation at Hadoop User Group:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~matei/talks/2010/hug_mesos.pdf
* Tech report on system design and current features:
http://mesos.berkeley.edu/mesos_tech_report.pdf (paper to appear at NSDI 2011
conference)
= Initial Source =
Mesos has been under development since spring 2009 by a team of graduate
students and researchers. It is currently hosted on GitHub under a BSD
license at http://github.com/mesos/mesos.
= External Dependencies =
The dependencies all have Apache compatible licenses, including BSD, MIT,
Boost, and Apache 2.0.
= Cryptography =
Not applicable.
= Required Resources =
== Mailing Lists ==
* mesos-private for private PMC discussions (with moderated subscriptions)
* mesos-dev
* mesos-commits
* mesos-user
== Subversion Directory ==
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/mesos
== Issue Tracking ==
JIRA Mesos (MESOS)
== Other Resources ==
The existing code already has unit tests, so we would like a Hudson instance
to run them whenever a new patch is submitted. This can be added after project
creation.
= Initial Committers =
* Ali Ghodsi (ali at sics dot se)
* Benjamin Hindman (benh at eecs dot berkeley dot edu)
* Andy Konwinski (andyk at eecs dot berkeley dot edu)
* Matei Zaharia (matei at apache dot org)
A CLA is already on file for Matei Zaharia.
= Affiliations =
* Ali Ghodsi (UC Berkeley / Swedish Institute of Computer Science)
* Benjamin Hindman (UC Berkeley)
* Andy Konwinski (UC Berkeley)
* Matei Zaharia (UC Berkeley)
= Sponsors =
== Champion ==
Tom White
== Nominated Mentors ==
* Dhruba Borthakur
* Brian McCallister
* Tom White
== Sponsoring Entity ==
Incubator PMC
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