[karlkfi]

It's worth noting that Kubernetes can also run on top of Mesos (https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes/tree/maste...) and DCOS (https://mesosphere.com/learn/).

So if you invest in Kubernetes and later want to take advantage of Mesos you can lift up k8s and put Mesos underneath.

Mesos is definitely more mature, and you can use Marathon for container orchestration, which is a little more mature than Kubernetes, but it's also a bit simpler. Marathon doesn't have the service, secrets, or pod abstractions, for example.

DCOS adds some additional benefits on top of Mesos, like the dcos-ui and dcos-cli. One of the more compelling features is one-step cluster package installation (ex: dcos package install kubernetes). Currently, the community edition is available on AWS (https://mesosphere.com/amazon/).

I do agree that the kube-up scripts in k8s are a bit of a mess. There's really hard to read and reverse engineer, and each provider has their own divergent deployment methods. That's one of the things DCOS is trying to standardize, to have a consistent deployment pattern for Mesos frameworks that deploys their core components inside Marathon, giving them a more battle-tested platform to live within, and granting automatic resurrection in case of failure.