Mesos is, in essence, a cluster manager that provides your applications the ability to scale beyond a single VM or physical machine. Mesos allows you to easily build a distributed system across a pool of shared resources. By providing common functionality that any distributed system needs (for example, failure detection, task distribution, task starting, task monitoring, task killing, and task cleanup), Mesos has become a popular choice the supporting big data Hadoop deployments. Mesos was created at the University of California at Berkeley's AMPLab and became an Apache Foundation top-level project in 2013 (http://mesos.apache.org/).