<i>at a broader level, projects like Marathon tie into the greater move toward software-defined networks, storage and even data centers. Companies are trying to replace expensive gear with commodity gear powered by smart software, and being able to automate cluster management and failover is certainly part of that equation.</i><p>At least this part is spot on.<p>They <i>seem</i> to be focused on ZooKeeper (both are Apache projects). I'd very much like to see a decent comparison of Pacemaker/Corosync @ <a href="http://clusterlabs.org/wiki/Main_Page" rel="nofollow">http://clusterlabs.org/wiki/Main_Page</a>, ZooKeeper @ <a href="https://zookeeper.apache.org/" rel="nofollow">https://zookeeper.apache.org/</a>, OpenReplica @ <a href="http://openreplica.org/" rel="nofollow">http://openreplica.org/</a> .. particularly given that the former is what I am most familiar with and what larger Linux businesses (RedHat, etc.) seem to be focused on.