One of the frameworks advertised as that it can be installed over a mesos cluster is Docker Swarm.
This is also mentioned on docker's github.
My question (and given that we are not dealing with a production-ready configuration) is whether there are any actual benefits of deploying a docker swarm over a mesos cluster, rather than directly over say ec2 instances allocated to swarm.
Mesos is not only docker but mostly resource orchestrator. It supports a bunch of frameworks so you can for example run docker containers via marathon and spark tasks on the same cluster. Most common production case is using mesos/marathon for docker orchestration but this decision does not have virtual network support out of the box. It can be achieved through Calica but it not so obvious as it should be - Swarm is much easier to deal with it. Frankly speaking, Mesos is much more robust than swarm, it is very well known and widely used in production as bulletproof solution, so the first part of my answer is more theoretical because in practice i prefer mesos/marathon or ECS if we talking about docker in AWS
Not sure this is on topic, but i would rather neither prefer mesos nor swarm, but in any case something that does kubernetes (directly or indirectly).
In this case, i really can give the advice to https://rancher.com/ (i am not biased ) - they support swarm and kubernetes, and with the upcoming release 2.0 kubernetes is even the default.
kubernetes done right manually can be a steep learning curve, but with an orchestrator and abstractor like rancher, you could not even care less. Swarm is as easy as kubernetes, and since "simplicity" is the only benefit of swarm over kubernetes, rancher+kubernetes is a huge winner.
