Spark Standalone, YARN, Mesos Modes

Standalone mode is the easiest to set up and will provide almost all the same features as the other cluster managers if you are only running Spark.

Standalone is good for small spark clusters, but it is not good for bigger clusters (There is an overhead of running spark daemons(master + slave) in cluster nodes). These daemons require dedicated resources. So standalone is not recommended for bigger production clusters.

In case of YARN and Mesos mode, Spark runs as an application and there are node daemons overhead. So We can use either YARN or Mesos for better performance and Scalability.

One advantage of Mesos over both YARN and standalone mode is its fine-grained sharing option, which lets interactive applications such as the Spark shell scale down their CPU allocation between commands. This makes it attractive in environments where multiple users are running interactive shells.

Reference:

https://www.quora.com/How-does-YARN-compare-to-Mesos