DevOps is a new concept and people are looking for information on Kubernetes vs Docker swarm, i.e. which tool to use between both.
Both tools have their own merits and demerits. in this article, we are comparing both the tools. We will provide you detail features of both Kubernetes and Docker Swarm.
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is an open-source container management system produced by Google. It is a portable system for automatic container deployment and administration. In practice, Kubernetes is the most commonly used tool next to Docker for better administration and implementation of containerized applications.
Features of Kubernetes
- Kubernetes automates several manual processes and controls server hosting and launching for you with ease.
- It manages containers, offers high security, networking and a large number of storage services at your disposal
- It monitors and continuously checks the health of nodes and containers in case something bad happens to your noeds or containers.
- It performs automatic rollback for changes that go wrong
- It provides a mounting facility and adds a storage system to run applications.
What is Docker?
Docker is a virtualization application platform that enables developers to create, deploy and manage applications in a Container with all their dependencies under the hood. Docker is a tool to automate the deployment of applications as a lightweight container so that the applications can work efficiently in different environments.
Features of Docker Swarm
- Decentralized access
- High security
- Autoload balancing
- High scalability
- Roll-back a task
Kubernetes VS Docker Swarm Which one should I use?
The selection of a tool depends on your infrastructure and its operations complexity, high availability requirements, and your team size and skillset. Without realizing this choosing one tool over others is a difficult task.
We personally use Kubernetes for the infrastructure and CICD requirements that our team worked on, using Kubernetes was a big game-changer over the docker and it brought a clear added value.
Here are few of added advantages for us:
1- Kubernetes improved MTTR for our containers/pods unlike docker alone, which in turn increases availability.
2- Kubernetes make it easy to support HA and scaling for our containers, in the end, we needed a containers manager, and k8s is the default way to go among the other choices available now.
3- Kubernetes has a strong community and its ecosystem is growing very fast, and by design, k8s is highly extendable and configurable, so we have different tooling to use out of the box to support our ongoing operations.
4- Docker as a container runtime is dominating this space, but it could die in favor of a better container runtime implementation, and hence with k8s we are able to unplug docker and seamlessly use any other runtime without impacting our platform users.
As was said earlier, it depends on the use case and roadmap, although this appears as a purely technical decision it remains tied with business directives and technology architecture roadmap that one has.
Docker Engine is the container runtime. We can do “docker run” on a host (a server or VM) and it’ll start a container for us. Docker uses cgroups, a union file system and other Linux primitives to run our container.
Pretty soon after we get used to doing “docker run” on a single host, we will realize that to run many containers across multiple hosts requires wiring them together, organizing storage, and exactly the right “docker run” commands to make everything work (and keep working even if a host goes down). That’s when we wish we had something to figure that out for us — that’s where Kubernetes comes in.
Kubernetes is a system for running fleets of containers across multiple hosts. It has higher-level constructs to make it easier to run collections of containers. Kubernetes is loosely based on Borg, Google’s container management system.
Docker also has a product called Swarm that allows you to build higher-level constructs from individual containers. Swarm is a lot easier to understand than Kubernetes, but not as powerful (today, at least).