Marathon

Marathon is an Apache Mesos framework for long-running applications. Given that you have Mesos running as the kernel for your datacenter, Marathon is the init or upstart daemon.

Marathon provides a REST API for starting, stopping, and scaling applications. Marathon is written in Scala and can run in highly-available mode by running multiple copies. The state of running tasks gets stored in the Mesos state abstraction.

Try Marathon now on AWS with Elastic Mesos or with Mesosphere for Google Compute Platform and learn how to use it in Mesosphere's interactive Marathon tutorial that can be personalized for your cluster.

Marathon is a meta framework: you can start other Mesos frameworks such as Chronos or Storm with it to ensure they survive machine failures. It can launch anything that can be launched in a standard shell. In fact, you can even start other Marathon instances via Marathon.

Using Marathon versions 0.7.0+ and Mesos 0.20.0+, you can deploy, run and scale Docker containers with ease.

Documentation for installing and configuring the full Mesosphere stack with Mesos + Marathon is available on the Mesosphere website.

Features

• HA -- run any number of Marathon schedulers, but only one gets elected as leader; if you access a non-leader, your request gets proxied to the current leader
• Constraints - e.g., only one instance of an application per rack, node, etc.
• Service Discovery & Load Balancing via HAProxy or the events API (see below).
• Health Checks: check your application's health via HTTP or TCP checks.
• Event Subscription lets you supply an HTTP endpoint to receive notifications, for example to integrate with an external load balancer.
• Web UI
• JSON/REST API for easy integration and scriptability
• Basic Auth and SSL
• Metrics: available at /metrics in JSON format

Setting Up And Running Marathon

Installation

Install Mesos

Marathon requires Mesos installed on the same machine in order to use a shared library. One easy way is via your system's package manager. Current builds for major Linux distributions are available from on the Mesosphere downloads page or from Mesosphere's repositories.

If building from source, see the Mesos Getting Started page or the Mesosphere tutorial for details. Running make install will install Mesos in /usr/local in the same way as these packages do.

Install Marathon

Full instructions on how to install prepackaged releases are available in the Marathon docs. Alternatively, you can build Marathon from source.

Building from Source

1. To build Marathon from source, check out this repo and use sbt to build a JAR:

   git clone https://github.com/mesosphere/marathon.git
   cd marathon
   sbt assembly
   

2. Run ./bin/build-distribution to package Marathon as an executable JAR (optional).

Running in Development Mode

Mesos local mode allows you to run Marathon without launching a full Mesos cluster. It is meant for experimentation and not recommended for production use. Note that you still need to run ZooKeeper for storing state. The following command launches Marathon on Mesos in local mode. Point your web browser to http://localhost:8080 to see the Marathon UI.

./bin/start --master local --zk zk://localhost:2181/marathon

For more information on how to run Marathon in production and configuration options, see the Marathon docs.

Developing Marathon

The Marathon Project Wiki contains documentation on simplifying local development and testing of Marathon including how to run a Mesos environment inside a preconfigured virtual machine and a list of recipes for launching applications that test specific Marathon features.

Running the development Docker

Build tip:

docker build -t marathon-tip .

Run it:

docker run marathon-tip --master local --zk zk://localhost:2181/marathon

If you want to inspect the contents of the Docker:

docker run -i -t --entrypoint=/bin/bash marathon-tip -s

Marathon Clients

• Ruby gem and command line client

  Running Chronos with the Ruby Marathon Client:

    marathon start -i chronos -u https://s3.amazonaws.com/mesosphere-binaries-public/chronos/chronos.tgz \
        -C "./chronos/bin/demo ./chronos/config/nomail.yml \
        ./chronos/target/chronos-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar" -c 1.0 -m 1024 -H http://foo.bar:8080
  

• Scala client, developed at Guidewire

• Java client by Mohit Soni

• Python client, developed at The Factory

• Python client, developed at Wizcorp

• Go client by Jean-Baptiste Dalido

• Node client by Silas Sewell

Companies using Marathon

• Airbnb
• Disqus
• eBay
• The Factory
• Guidewire
• iQIYI
• OpenTable
• PayPal
• Sailthru
• Viadeo
• WooRank

Not in the list? Open a pull request and add yourself!

Help

If you have questions, please post on the Marathon Framework Group email list. You can find Mesos support in the #mesos channel on freenode (IRC). The team at Mesosphere is also happy to answer any questions.

Authors

Marathon was created by Tobias Knaup and Florian Leibert and continues to be developed by the team at Mesosphere and by many contributors from the community.