Mesos is an open source cluster management framework that provides efficient resource isolation and sharing across distributed applications or frameworks. It divides resources into CPU, memory, storage, and other compute resources and shares those resources dynamically and efficiently across applications. Mesos abstracts the underlying infrastructure to provide a unified API to applications while employing operating system-level virtualization through interfaces like Docker to maximize resource utilization. It works by having a Mesos master that negotiates resources among Mesos slaves to run applications or frameworks, which are made up of a scheduler to negotiate for resources and executors to run tasks. Common frameworks that run on Mesos include Spark, Hadoop and Docker containers.