http://datastrophic.io/resource-allocation-in-mesos-dominant-resource-fairness-explained/
Original paper at: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~alig/papers/drf.pdf
Key Take-away:
Dominant resource - a resource of specific type (cpu, memory, disk, ports) which is most demanded by given framework among other resources it needs. This resource is identified as a share of the total cluster resources of the same type.
DRF computes the share of dominant resource allocated to a framework (dominant share) and tries to maximize the smallest dominant share in the system. During next round of resource offers allocation module applies DRF to identify the dominant shares of the frameworks and offers the resources first to the one with smallest dominant share, then to the second smallest one and so on.