>"Mesos + a framework such as Marathon or Aurora was the most needy choice before Kubernetes came on the scene."

How is Mesos "needy"? Can you elaborate?

Needy has a negative connotation and it's not word I would necessarily associate with the Apache Mesos project. I've run a number of clusters in production now for just over a year with Marathon and it pretty much "just works." I have done 5 or 6 rolling upgrades now without issues. I haven't found it to be needy at all, quite the opposite, its been rock solid and the management overhead has been nominal.

>" I don't know if any of them are as flexible as Kubernetes in terms of things like volume management, config/secret management and security."

I think that Mesos is actually more flexible as it allows you to cherry pick the non-scheduler specific components to fit your use case. As an example for secrets management you can use something like Consul Vault or integrate Keywhiz or completely roll your own.

I feel like with Kubenetes you buy into the "whole thing". Using the example of secret management - you have one choice for secret management and the last time I checked they were stored in etcd in clear text. So if that doesn't fit your security requirements it seemed like you were out of luck.

Mesos also has a nice for for persistent volumes:

See: http://mesos.apache.org/documentation/latest/persistent-volu...

and:

http://schd.ws/hosted_files/mesosconeu2016/08/MesosConEurope...