Mesos began as a research project in the UC Berkeley RAD Lab by then PhD students Benjamin Hindman, Andy Konwinski, and Matei Zaharia, as well as professor Ion Stoica.

[2] Mesos was first presented in 2009 (while still named Nexus) by Andy Konwinski at HotCloud '09 in a talk accompanying the first paper published about the project.

[3] Later in 2011 it was presented in a more mature state in a talk by Zaharia at the Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation conference about the paper "Mesos: A Platform for Fine-Grained Resource Sharing in the Data Center" by Benjamin Hindman, Andy Konwinski, Zaharia, Ali Ghodsi, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy Katz, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica.

[10] Apache Aurora is a Mesos framework for both long-running services and cron jobs, originally developed by Twitter starting in 2010 and open sourced in late 2013.

[12] It can scale to tens of thousands of servers, and holds many similarities to Borg[13][14] including its rich domain-specific language (DSL) for configuring services.

[21] In August 2015, it was announced that Verizon selected Mesosphere's DC/OS, which is based on open source Apache Mesos, for data center service orchestration.