I wouldn't expect Marathon to do service discovery for you, as I believe that is better left to something like Mesos-dns/Consul which marathon can supervise for

I wouldn't expect Marathon to do service discovery for you, as I believe that is better left to something like Mesos-dns/Consul which marathon can supervise for you, and docker integration has been fairly simple. In any case I found my marathon was not without issues, like failover causing every application to restart (I think this was fixed in 0.8.2), or the fact that marathon tends to use 2x as much RAM as Zookeeper or Mesos-Master (I run the 3 on the same node). Have you seen the aurora apache project? It solves the same problems as marathon, and its creators claim it was built to handle stability. I originally chose marathon as JSON configuration over REST was easier to wrap my head around, but was this something you tried and how did it work for you?