Automatically Scaling Mesos Services and Clusters at Yelp

Capacity planning is a difficult challenge faced by most companies. If you have too few machines, you will not have enough compute resources available to deal with heavy loads. On the other hand, if you have too many machines, you are wasting money. This is why companies have started investing in automatically scaling services and infrastructure to minimize the amount of wasted money and resources.

In this talk, Nathan will describe how Yelp is using PaaSTA, a PaaS built on top of open source tools including Docker, Mesos, Marathon, and Chronos, to automatically and gracefully scale services and the underlying cluster. He will go into detail about how this functionality was implemented and the design designs that were made while architecting the system. He will also provide a brief comparison of how this approach differs from existing solutions.