Apache Mesos is a cluster manager that provides efficient resource isolation and sharing across distributed applications, or frameworks. It can run Hadoop, MPI, Hypertable, Spark, and other applications on a dynamically shared pool of nodes. Mesos is used by a number of web-scale companies such as Twitter, Airbnb and even Apple.
Cluster managers such as Mesos and Kubernetes are easier to set up than a full-blown IAAS stack: they do not orchestrate network, storage and other services. Plus they solve the problem of dividing (and bundling) the capacity of a single virtual machine into more useful chunks. Mesos can schedule containers on the cluster in addition to other workloads. Cluster managers are easy to setup on traditional virtualization infrastructure as well (check out Citrix Lifecycle Manager for an example). But without persistent volumes, load balancers and other network services, cluster managers may not be able to tackle the full range of workloads handled by IAAS.
If you already have Apache CloudStack up and running and want to run a cluster manager on it, it just got easier. I used Packer and Terraform to completely automate the provisioning of a full Mesos cluster. This recipe (here) first uses Packer to build a re-usable Ubuntu 14.04 image with the required packages installed (Zookeeper, Mesos, Marathon, etc). The Terraform configuration drives the creation of the cluster using this template.
Just for completeness, I have Kubernetes-on-CloudStack automated as well (using Terraform). For better or worse, both Mesos and Kubernetes are rapidly evolving, so the automation may be broken by the time you are trying it out. Feel free to open a pull request to correct any errors.
