Recently I've discovered such a thing as a Apache Mesos.
It all looks amazingly in all that demos and examples. I could easily imagine how one would run for stateless jobs - that fits to the whole idea naturally.
Bot how to deal with long running jobs that are stateful?
Say, I have a cluster that consists of N machines (and that is scheduled via Marathon). And I want to run a postgresql server there.
That's it - at first I don't even want it to be highly available, but just simply a single job (actually Dockerized) that hosts a postgresql server.
1- How would one organize it? Constraint a server to a particular cluster node? Use some distributed FS?
2- DRBD, MooseFS, GlusterFS, NFS, CephFS, which one of those play well with Mesos and services like postgres? (I'm thinking here on the possibility that Mesos/marathon could relocate the service if goes down)
3- Please tell if my approach is wrong in terms of philosophy (DFS for data servers and some kind of switchover for servers like postgres on the top of Mesos)
Question largely copied from Persistent storage for Apache Mesos, asked by zerkms on Programmers Stack Exchange.
Excellent question. Here are a few upcoming features in Mesos to improve support for stateful services, and corresponding current workarounds.
--resources
flag to statically reserve resources for your framework upon slave startup.As for your specific use case and questions:
1a) How would one organize it? You could do this with Marathon, perhaps creating a separate Marathon instance for your stateful services, so that you can create static reservations for the 'stateful' role, such that only the stateful Marathon will be guaranteed those resources.
1b) Constraint a server to a particular cluster node? You can do this easily in Marathon, constraining an application to a specific hostname, or any node with a specific attribute value (e.g. NFS_Access=true). See Marathon Constraints. If you only wanted to run your tasks on a specific set of nodes, you would only need to create the static reservations on those nodes. And if you need discoverability of those nodes, you should check out Mesos-DNS and/or Marathon's HAProxy integration.
1c) Use some distributed FS? The data replication provided by many distributed filesystems would guarantee that your data can survive the failure of any single node. Persisting to a DFS would also provide more flexibility in where you can schedule your tasks, although at the cost of the difference in latency between network and local disk. Mesos has built-in support for fetching binaries from HDFS uris, and many customers use HDFS for passing executor binaries, config files, and input data to the slaves where their tasks will run.
2) DRBD, MooseFS, GlusterFS, NFS, CephFS? I've heard of customers using CephFS, HDFS, and MapRFS with Mesos. NFS would seem an easy fit too. It really doesn't matter to Mesos what you use as long as your task knows how to access it from whatever node where it's placed.
Hope that helps!