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.

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.

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.
• Marathon UI
• JSON/REST API for easy integration and scriptability
• Basic Auth and SSL
• Metrics: query them at /metrics in JSON format or push them to graphite/statsd/datadog.

Documentation

Marathon documentation is available on the Marathon GitHub pages site.

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

Contributing

We heartily welcome external contributions to Marathon's documentation. Documentation should be committed to the master branch and published to our GitHub pages site using the instructions in docs/README.md.

Setting Up And Running Marathon

Dependencies

Marathon has the following compile-time dependencies:

• sbt - A build tool for scala. You can find the instructions for installing sbt for Mac OS X and Linux over here.
• JDK 1.8+

For run-time, Marathon has the following dependencies:

• libmesos - JNI bindings for talking to Apache Mesos master. Look at the Install Mesos section for instructions to get libmesos.
• Apache Zookeeper - You can have a spearate Zookeeper installation specifically for Marathon, or you can use the same Zookeeper used by Mesos.

Installation

Install Mesos

Marathon requires libmesos, a shared object library, that contains JNI bindings for Marathon to talk to the Mesos master. libmesos comes as part of the Apache Mesos installation. There are two options for installing Apache Mesos.

Installing Mesos from prepackaged releases

Instructions on how to install prepackaged releases of Mesos are available in the Marathon docs.

Building Mesos from source

NOTE: Choose this option only if building Marathon from source, else there might be version incompatibility between pre-packaged releases of Marathon and Mesos built from source.

You can find the instructions for compiling Mesos from source in the Apache Mesos getting started docs. If you want Mesos to install libraries and executables in a non-default location use the --prefix option during configuration as follows:

./configure --prefix=<path to Mesos installation>

The make install will install libmesos (libmesos.so on Linux and libmesos.dylib on Mac OS X) in the install directory.

Install Marathon

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

See the documentation on how to run Marathon locally inside a virtual machine.

Running the development Docker

Build tip:

docker build -t marathon-head .

Run it:

docker run marathon-head --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-head -s

Marathon UI

To develop on the web UI look into the instructions of the Marathon UI repository.

Marathon Clients

• marathonctl A handy CLI tool for controlling Marathon

• Ruby gem and command line client

  Running Chronos with the Ruby Marathon Client:

    marathon -M http://foo.bar:8080 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
  

• Ruby gem marathon_deploy alternative command line tool to deploy using json or yaml files with ENV macros.

• Scala client, developed at Guidewire

• Java client by Mohit Soni

• Maven plugin, developed at HolidayCheck

• Python client, developed at The Factory

• Python client, developed at Wizcorp

• Go client by Rohith Jayawardene

• Go client by Jean-Baptiste Dalido

• Node client by Silas Sewell

• Clojure client by Halit Olali

Companies using Marathon

Across all installations Marathon is managing applications on more than 100,000 nodes world-wide. These are some of the companies using it:

• Allegro Group
• AllUnite
• Argus Cyber Security
• Artirix
• bol.com
• Branding Brand
• Corvisa
• [Criteo] (http://www.criteo.com/)
• Daemon
• DataMan
• DHL Parcel
• Disqus
• DueDil
• eBay
• The Factory
• Football Radar
• Guidewire
• Groupon
• GSShop
• HolidayCheck
• Human API
• Indix
• ING
• iQIYI
• LaunchKey
• Measurence
• Motus
• Notonthehighstreet
• OpenTable
• Orbitz
• Otto
• PayPal
• Qubit
• RelateIQ
• Refinery29
• Sailthru
• sloppy.io
• SmartProcure
• Strava
• Sveriges Television
• Teradata
• trivago
• VANAD Enovation
• Viadeo
• Wikia
• WooRank
• Yelp

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

Help

Have you found an issue? Feel free to report it using our Issues page. In order to speed up response times, we ask you to provide as much information on how to reproduce the problem as possible. If the issue is related in any way to the web ui, we kindly ask you to use the gui label.

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

If you'd like to take part in design research and test new features in Marathon before they're released, please add your name to our UX Research list.

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.

Acknowledgements

YourKit, LLC

YourKit supports open source projects with its full-featured Java Profiler. YourKit, LLC is the creator of YourKit Java Profiler and YourKit .NET Profiler, innovative and intelligent tools for profiling Java and .NET applications.