Containers have become popular thanks to their focus on consistency across platforms from development to production.
The rise in interest to containers has in turn brought in higher demands for their deployment and management.
The need for better control attracted a number of software options as solutions for container orchestration, which allows for abstraction of individual containers to services with a number of instances or replicas.
Two of the major players developing container orchestration are Docker and Kubernetes.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open-source platform for container deployment automation, scaling, and operations across clusters of hosts. The production ready orchestrator draws on Google’s
extensive experience of years of working with Linux containers.
Kubernetes aims to provide the components and tools to relieve the burden of running applications in public and private clouds by grouping containers into logical units. Their strengths lie in flexible growth, environment agnostic portability, and easy scaling.
Docker Swarm
Swarm is the native clustering for Docker. Originally Docker Swarm did not provide much in the sense of container automation, but with the update to Docker Engine 1.12, container orchestration is now built into its core with first party support.
Docker Swarm is designed around four core principles:
Simple yet powerful with a “just works” user experience,
Resilient zero single-point-of-failure architecture,
Secure by default with automatically generated certificates, and
Backwards compatibility with existing components.
The promise of backwards compatibility is especially important to the existing users. Any tools or containers that work with Docker run equally well in Docker Swarm.
Comparisons
Although both orchestrators provide much of the same functionality to one another, there are fundamental differences in between how the two operate. Below are listed some of the most notable points on where these rivals diverge.
Summary
Throughout the comparison, it is possible to note how Kubernetes and Docker Swarm fundamentally differ.
Swarm focuses on ease of use with integration with Docker core components while Kubernetes remains open and modular.
The same difference can be noticed while installing and configuring each of the orchestrators.
Docker provides a simple solution that is fast to get started with while Kubernetes aims to support higher demands with higher complexity.
For much of the same reasons, Docker has been popular among developers who prefer simplicity and fast deployments.
At the same time, Kubernetes is used in production environments by many high profile internet companies running popular services