Apache Mesos Open Source Contribution

Inspiration

The contributors/maintainers of Apache Mesos were here at HackIllinois, we were working with our mentor (shoutout https://github.com/andschwa) to port mesos-execute (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MESOS-8607) and mesos-master (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MESOS-5820) executables to Windows. The existing source files were not building in the windows environment, and hence the mesos-execute framework could not be tested along with the mesos-master and mesos-agent on a single machine having windows environment. With the existing code, if one wanted to test mesos on a windows machine, the mesos-master and mesos-execute had to be deployed in a virtual machine and the process was a bit cumbersome.

What it does

We ported the mesos-execute and mesos-master with the help of some minor fixes, and now the mesos-execute (a simple command line utility framework), mesos-master and mesos-agent can be executed as three different processes on the same windows machine. This is particularly helpful for testing purposes.

How we built it

We added preprocessor directives to avoid making calls to system calls that were not supported by the windows kernel.

Challenges we ran into

The entire process was pretty straight forward, thanks to our mentor who pointed us to the existing code that was solving similar problems.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of us had never worked with Mesos and he enjoyed learning about the architecure of the Mesos project. Another team member was attending his first hackathon. We were able to successfully resolve the issues that we were targeting to fix.

What we learned

We learnt a lot about the source code behind Apache Mesos, we learnt about the coding practices that were being followed within the project. We learnt on how the commit process works while contributing to Apache projects.

What's next for Mesos

We will continue to understand the mesos architecture in more detail. We plan to work on newer unresolved issues.