New open source tech Marathon wants to make your data center run like Google’s

http://gigaom.com/2013/09/04/new-open-source-tech-marathon-wants-to-make-your-data-center-run-like-googles/

by tknaup • 13 years ago

60 22 13 years ago

Skimmed through the article and I didn't find any evidence of "making your data center run like Google's". More specifically: I didn't see any live data connections to the NSA.

necubi4• 13 years ago

What value could this possibly add to the discussion?

peterwwillis5• 13 years ago

"Marathon launches two instances of the Chronos scheduler as a Marathon task. If either of the two Chronos tasks dies -- due to underlying slave crashes, power loss in the cluster, etc. -- Marathon will re-start an Chronos instance on another slave. This approach ensures that two Chronos processes are always running."

So basically, it's a distributed crond. I could be wrong, but I don't think this will make your datacenter run like Google's.

necubi4• 13 years ago

Really, it's mesos that "makes your datacenter run like Google's," while Marathon is a framework built on top of it that provides distributed service management (think distributed upstart). Mesos is in part based on ideas from Google's Borg cluster management system.

The basic idea is to provide the abstraction of a single machine to developers, who can say things like: I want to run this program on 40 cores with 100GB of memory, and the system will find those resources across the cluster, create a cgroup with your resource limits, and start your services. It also provides various tools for writing distributed services, like an implementation of PAXOS.

peterwwillis5• 13 years ago

But Mesos already provides distributed service management. Why is Marathon doing it too? And why do you need Chronos if Marathon performs the same functions?

rjurney• 13 years ago

That is one service, Chronos, which is a distributed cron. Marathon is much more.

charmalloc• 13 years ago

Right, Marathon is like a distributed init.d

contingencies• 13 years ago

at a broader level, projects like Marathon tie into the greater move toward software-defined networks, storage and even data centers. Companies are trying to replace expensive gear with commodity gear powered by smart software, and being able to automate cluster management and failover is certainly part of that equation.

At least this part is spot on.

They seem to be focused on ZooKeeper (both are Apache projects). I'd very much like to see a decent comparison of Pacemaker/Corosync @ http://clusterlabs.org/wiki/Main_Page, ZooKeeper @ https://zookeeper.apache.org/, OpenReplica @ http://openreplica.org/ .. particularly given that the former is what I am most familiar with and what larger Linux businesses (RedHat, etc.) seem to be focused on.

electic2• 13 years ago

Won't Docker be able to take this type of efficiency to a whole new level?

WestCoastJustin• 13 years ago

No. Docker just supports provisioning containers. Take a high level view of a data centre with 10,000 machines, you need orchestration software that knows about and automates these 10k machines, which ones are online/offline, utilization, storage, networking, current state, power distribution (what happens if a racks power drops out?), etc and then provisions these containers onto that hardware. Think of this orchestration software like a brain, and it knows about the current state of things, keeps a watch on what is happening in the data centre, fixes things when they go bad, and knows where to put things when you want to do something.

  Docker --> hardware
  Orchestration software --> Docker/LXC/VM/etc --> hardware

An additional example would be dotCloud (makers of Docker), they have orchestration software sitting atop Docker, which knows about users, machines, etc and then provision these docker instances on AWS hardware.

   dotCloud (orchestration software) --> Docker --> AWS EC2 (hardware)

There is a great wired article (linked to below [1] and in the OPs story), which outline how Google uses this orchestration software in its day-to-day operations. There is this great diagram [2], which shows Omega (Google's orchestration software), and how it deploys containers for images, search, gmail, etc onto the same physical hardware. There is an amazing talk by John Wilkes (Google Cluster Management, Mountain View) about Omega at Google Faculty Summit 2011 [3], I would highly recommend watching it!

ps. Orchestration software has a global view of resources across all machines, so it knows how to get the best utilization out of all these machine (think jigsaw puzzle). You submit a container profile to the orchestration software, things like instance lifetime, cpu, storage, memory, redudance, and the software will figure out where to place your instances.

[1] http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/google-borg-twi...

[2] http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/wp-content/uploads/2013...

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZFMlO98Jkc

electic2• 13 years ago

Thanks! That clears things up. I appreciate that.

P.S. - Not to Justin but others. Funny, you ask a honest question on here and people downvote you...sigh.

lambda• 13 years ago

So, how does this compare to the Corosync/Pacemaker cluster stack?

necubi4• 13 years ago

I'm not familiar with those tools, but from the clusterlabs website it looks like they're solving a different problem. Mesos is primary intended for use on clusters with thousands of machines and heterogenous application needs. It provides resource isolation and scheduling as well as some components that make writing distributed systems easier.

New open source tech Marathon wants to make your data center run like Google’s

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