[tonymke]

We've been in a self-hosted mesos/marathon cluster since mid/late 2014.

Today it's an absolute pleasure to use in a dev team of 5.

We had to address quite a few things over the years to make it that way, particularly in the early days - docker, mesos, and marathon's tooling in particular were quite weak at the time. Some of the big ones: How do you centralize configuration properly across DCs and environments? How do you properly CI/CD? Log and metric at scale? How do we proxy traffic from the edge to containers in a way that doesn't involve bothering an ops guy every time we shuffle things about, pre-k8s? What if we need to churn faster than what marathon is built for?

Once we worked through those, it became pretty changing as a developer. I don't think I would enjoy going back to the pre-container life - things just take so much longer to get done.

We're just doing our first k8s project now. Our existing solutions handle a lot of the big bang it would bring into any other team's lives, but certain things (managed persistent volumes, making stateful containers practical) mean I will be writing less chef recipes. I definitely appreciate that.