Marathon vs. Apache Hadoop YARN

Marathon is a powerful container orchestration tool that works in harmony with Mesosphere’s Datacenter Operating System (DC/OS) and Apache Mesos to provide exceptional high availability through its active/passive clustering and leader election strategies, ensuring uninterrupted service. It is compatible with multiple container runtimes, offering seamless integration for Mesos containers that utilize cgroups and Docker, making it suitable for a variety of development ecosystems. Furthermore, Marathon enables the deployment of stateful applications by allowing users to attach persistent storage volumes to their applications, which proves advantageous for running data-driven databases like MySQL and Postgres under Mesos management. The platform features a user-friendly and robust interface, alongside an array of service discovery and load balancing solutions tailored to meet different requirements. Health checks are conducted to assess application performance through HTTP or TCP protocols, thereby enhancing reliability. Additionally, users can establish event subscriptions by supplying an HTTP endpoint to receive notifications, facilitating integration with external load balancers. Metrics can be accessed in JSON format at the /metrics endpoint and can also be integrated with popular monitoring systems such as Graphite, StatsD, DataDog, or scraped by Prometheus, thereby allowing for thorough monitoring and evaluation of application performance. This array of capabilities makes Marathon an adaptable and effective solution for managing containerized applications, ensuring that developers have the tools they need for efficient orchestration and management. Ultimately, its features not only streamline operational processes but also enhance the overall deployment experience for various applications.

The fundamental principle of YARN centers on distributing resource management and job scheduling/monitoring through the use of separate daemons for each task. It features a centralized ResourceManager (RM) paired with unique ApplicationMasters (AM) for every application, which can either be a single job or a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) of jobs. In tandem, the ResourceManager and NodeManager establish the computational infrastructure required for data processing. The ResourceManager acts as the primary authority, overseeing resource allocation for all applications within the framework. In contrast, the NodeManager serves as a local agent on each machine, managing containers, monitoring their resource consumption—including CPU, memory, disk, and network usage—and communicating this data back to the ResourceManager/Scheduler. Furthermore, the ApplicationMaster operates as a dedicated library for each application, tasked with negotiating resource distribution with the ResourceManager while coordinating with the NodeManagers to efficiently execute and monitor tasks. This clear division of roles significantly boosts the efficiency and scalability of the resource management system, ultimately facilitating better performance in large-scale computing environments. Such an architecture allows for more dynamic resource allocation and the ability to handle diverse workloads effectively.