kakfa-mesos is a package that includes a release of Kafka and a custom mesos scheduler that was meant to work around issues with running Kafka as a stateful service on Marathon. I think post but confluent is useful. It also includes a RESTful api for doing ops tasks and aims to include these features in the future (this is pulled from the article I linked)
- Integrating Kafka commands (e.g. kafka-topics, etc) into the Scheduler so it can be used through the CLI and REST API.
- Auto-scaling clusters (including auto reassignment of partitions) so that the resources (CPU, RAM, etc.) that brokers are using can be used elsewhere in known valleys of traffic.
- Rack-aware partition assignment for fault tolerance.
- Hooks so that producers and consumers can also be launched from the Scheduler and managed with the cluster.
- Automated partition reassignment based on load and traffic
I haven't used it in a production environment myself but it has the support of Confluent which is a good sign.
DC/OS Kafka on the other hand is a DC/OS service which will probably only be useful if you are already running or plan on running services through Mesosphere's DC/OS. It also includes an API and a CLI management tool but is less ambitious with additional features. It's current feature set includes
- Single-command installation for rapid provisioning
- Multiple clusters for multiple tenancy with DC/OS
- High availability runtime configuration and software updates
- Storage volumes for enhanced data durability, known as Mesos Dynamic * * Reservations and Persistent Volumes
- Integration with syslog-compatible logging services for diagnostics and troubleshooting
- Integration with statsd-compatible metrics services for capacity and performance monitoring
