I'm afraid answers like this actually make the confusion problem worse (nothing against your comment, just an observation in general.)
If you're confused about the differences between similar-sounding products X and Y, the fact that "X runs on Y" or "Y supports X" has never made the situation any better, it only makes the line between X and Y even more blurred.
I think this is especially true of Mesos, because people have a tendency to attribute qualities to Mesos that are actually qualities of a particular Mesos framework like Marathon or Aurora. As it is, Mesos is more of an SDK than anything, giving you the tools to write an orchestration system. It comes with built-in ways to communicate with nodes over a message bus, the ability to look at your nodes as resources, etc... but all of the scheduling logic is up to the frameworks themselves.
I think Mesos has a perception problem because of this. They want to build up hype about what mesos is and can do, so they claim things like Mesos being able to schedule docker images and keep them running, etc... but that's really the job of something like Marathon that runs as a Mesos framework. But if they didn't claim such things, Mesos wouldn't seem very compelling.
To me, the biggest benefit of Mesos is what the gain would be if every datacenter scheduler was a Mesos framework (yarn/spark/kubernetes/marathon/fleet/swarm/aurora, etc), and Mesos was only used to maintain multitenancy on the same hardware. That's where the real advantages come from... if you want to try Kubernetes you shouldn't have to dedicate hardware to it, you should just install it on your existing mesos cluster that is already running the rest of your stuff. In this respect, mesos is only useful insofar as all the big cluster managers use it as their underlying substrate.
"X runs on Y" at least implies Y is "lower level" than X.
As I understand it, Mesos is analogous to an operating system kernel for your cluster, while Kubernetes is a CaaS (containers-as-a-service) layer on top.
>>> Mesos is more of an SDK than anything, giving you the tools to write an orchestration system
This is why Mesosphere built their DCOS; it recognizes that Mesos is a sharp-edged distributed systems kernel and needs to be packaged with convenience layers like Marathon and Chronos and "userland" tools (CLI, graphical UI, packaging system, etc) that make it a complete OS.
If you're confused about the differences between similar-sounding products X and Y, the fact that "X runs on Y" or "Y supports X" has never made the situation any better, it only makes the line between X and Y even more blurred.
I think this is especially true of Mesos, because people have a tendency to attribute qualities to Mesos that are actually qualities of a particular Mesos framework like Marathon or Aurora. As it is, Mesos is more of an SDK than anything, giving you the tools to write an orchestration system. It comes with built-in ways to communicate with nodes over a message bus, the ability to look at your nodes as resources, etc... but all of the scheduling logic is up to the frameworks themselves.
I think Mesos has a perception problem because of this. They want to build up hype about what mesos is and can do, so they claim things like Mesos being able to schedule docker images and keep them running, etc... but that's really the job of something like Marathon that runs as a Mesos framework. But if they didn't claim such things, Mesos wouldn't seem very compelling.
To me, the biggest benefit of Mesos is what the gain would be if every datacenter scheduler was a Mesos framework (yarn/spark/kubernetes/marathon/fleet/swarm/aurora, etc), and Mesos was only used to maintain multitenancy on the same hardware. That's where the real advantages come from... if you want to try Kubernetes you shouldn't have to dedicate hardware to it, you should just install it on your existing mesos cluster that is already running the rest of your stuff. In this respect, mesos is only useful insofar as all the big cluster managers use it as their underlying substrate.