[No Audio]
Docker Swarm is pretty useful. But whenever we
talk about container orchestration, one name
dominates the conversation, which is Kubernetes.
You might wonder, aren't we already done with orchestration?
Well, not yet. Docker Swarm and
Kubernetes both co-exist in the market, and even
Docker itself has acknowledged it, since it
provides support for Kubernetes with its speedy
enterprise version. Plus, as far as my knowledge
goes, there is no such thing as managed Docker
Swarm on any of the popular public cloud platforms.
Whereas managed Kubernetes is one of
the salient features of Google Cloud.
That's not all, Azure and AWS are catching up pretty fast too.
These are more than enough reasons to learn
Kubernetes alongside Swarm, but we should know the
advantages and challenges of both.
Let's start with the nature. Swarm is a part of Docker's ecosystem.
So all of its features act as an
extension of Dockers own capabilities.
Whereas Kubernetes is an entirely different product
managed by CNCF, which stands for Cloud Native
Computing Foundation. Since Swarm belongs to
Docker Ecosystem, you didn't face any trouble
adapting its terminologies or concepts, because
most of them were in line with what you could already do with Docker.
So Swarm is easier to set up
and adapt, nothing is ever too difficult once
you get a hang of it. But setting up and adapting
Kubernetes introduces more new concepts compared
to Swarm, so you can definitely call it relatively difficult.
Plus Kubernetes introduces a whole new
command line, whereas Swarm's command line is
pretty similar to Docker CLI itself.
As far as the utilities go,
Docker Swarm dives less deeper into
the field of orchestration, whereas Kubernetes
provides you a lot more exhaustive orchestration
functionalities. Monitoring Swarm can be tricky,
since it either involves third-party tools or paid
services by Docker enterprise, whereas Kubernetes
provides native support for logging and monitoring.
Moreover, Docker Swarm doesn't only
have less functionalities compared to Kubernetes,
but it also becomes difficult to manage after
having more than 50 nodes or so.
Because you may not have sufficient control over scheduling
certain containers on certain nodes, which can be
mind boggling to manage. Whereas in case of
Kubernetes, we have a lot more freedom and fault
tolerance. The finer control allows us to group
nodes as we want and abstain or containers from
being scheduled at certain nodes. In fact,
Kubernetes has shown promising performances, even
in the case of more than 1000 nodes.
Due to all of this, even though Docker Swarm has good community
support and featured updates, Kubernetes has huge
support and has turned into a complete DevOps
buzzword by all positive means.
All in all, it means the greater your application, the more
likely you are to use Kubernetes rather than Swarm.
Of course, not everyone targets millions of
audience and ever scaling clusters, for them Swarm
might be enough. But for you as a learner, the
journey must not end before learning exciting
aspects of Kubernetes