ryanl-ee

It's easy enough to set that up (though it's not the recommended use case) using kubeadm.

Azure Container Service is simply a PaaS-ish offering of Swam, DC/OS, or Kubernetes. It still spins up VMs that you can log into, but handles deployment/provisioning of the product, and makes some assumptions about your use case. It's a great way to push a button and have a "real" deployment of those services to evaluate, especially if your goal is a platform-agnostic target. I work for an Azure-focused cloud consultancy and for any serious production environment we still build out a more custom deployment using a combination of Terraform, Chef, Cloud-Init, CoreOS, etc.

I use Madsonic with the Dsub Android app.

Have you checked out DC/OS? It's built on Mesos/Marathon/etc. and has some pretty cool service discovery/routing built in, i.e. Minuteman which allows you to define virtual IPs and ports that map to specific services.

Well, the included packages in the "dcos package" CLI repo are just the prepackaged frameworks. You can actually deploy Kubernetes on top of DCOS in the same way - it natively supports Docker containers as an execution method.

Have you checked out DCOS? Once you have your cluster set up, your path to installing Spark is running "dcos package install spark" on your laptop.