my two cents and from various online sources...
DC/OS is a datacenter operating system, also a distributed system. The operating system is based on the Apache Mesos distributed kernel. See Apache Mesos more details below
It comprises of three main components:
- A cluster manager,
- A container platform, and
- An operating system.
Essentially DC/OS abstracts the infrastructure below with the Mesos and provides powerful tools that can run services and applications and more importantly you would find complete SMACK stack all pulled in under one OS platform. DC/OS has a built-in self-healing distributed system.
It is agnostic to infrastructure layer meaning the host may consist of either virtual or physical hardware as long as it provides computing, storage and networking., it is designed to run anywhere on-premises and/or virtual AWS, AZURE….see https://dcos.io/docs/1.10/overview/
Apache Mesos is a distributed kernel and it is the backbone of DC/OS. It’s programmed against your datacentre as being a single pool of resources. It abstracts CPU, memory, storage and other computing resouces.. It also provides an API for resource management , scheduling across datacentre and cloud environment. It can be scale up to 10,000’s of nodes. So it can definitely be considered as a solution for large production clusters. It supports container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes and of course Marathon.
Mesosphere - DC/OS is created and maintained by Mesosphere