Aurora is a service scheduler that schedules jobs onto Mesos, which runs tasks at a specified cluster. Typical services consist of up to hundreds of task replicas.
Aurora provides a Job abstraction consisting of a Task template and instructions for creating near-identical replicas of that Task (modulo things like “instance id” or specific port numbers which may differ from machine to machine).
Terminology Note: Replicas are also referred to as shards and instances. While there is a general desire to move to using “instances”, “shard” is still found in commands and help strings.
Typically a Task is a single Process corresponding to a single command line, such as python2.6 my_script.py. However, sometimes you must colocate separate Processes together within a single Task, which runs within a single container and chroot, often referred to as a “sandbox”. For example, if you run multiple cooperating agents together such as logrotate, installer, and master or slave processes. Thermos provides a Process abstraction under the Mesos Tasks.
To use and get up to speed on Aurora, you should look the docs in this directory in this order:
To contact the Aurora Developer List, email dev@aurora.incubator.apache.org. You may want to read the list archives. You can also use the IRC channel #aurora on irc.freenode.net