Kubernetes vs. Docker : Real meaning?

“Kubernetes vs. Docker” is a phrase that we hear more and more as Kubernetes becomes more popular as a container orchestration solution.

Docker and Kubernetes aren’t direct competitors. "Kubernetes vs. Docker Swarm" are in the completion

The rise of use of Docker

Containers and container platforms provide more advantages over virtualization. Isolation of resources is done on the kernel level without the need for a guest operating system, so containers are much more efficient, fast, and lightweight. Which allows applications to become encapsulated in self-contained environments which has advantages, such as quicker deployments, scalability and reduced equality between development environments.

Docker is currently the most popular container platform. 

Docker has the Docker Engine, which is a run-time and allows you to build and run containers.

The rise of Orchestration Systems

While Docker provided an open standard for packaging and distributing containerized applications, there was a new problem.

How can all these containers be coordinated, scheduled, communicate with each other and can be scaled?

Solutions for orchestrating containers emerged soon. Kubernetes, Mesos, and Docker Swarm are some of the more popular options.

When we talk about “Kubernetes vs. Docker,” they really mean is “Kubernetes vs. Docker Swarm.” 

Docker Swarm is is Docker's native clustering solution for Docker containers, which is tightly integrated to Docker ecosystem and has its own APIs.

Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration engine for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. This open source project is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

It is a system for automating deployment, scheduling and scaling of containerized applications, and supports many containerization tools one of it is Docker.

Currently, Kubernetes is the market leader and the standardized means of orchestrating containers and deploying distributed applications.

How Does Kubernetes Relate to Docker?

Kubernetes and Docker are both comprehensive de-facto solutions to intelligently manage containerized applications and provide powerful capabilities, and from this some confusion has emerged. “Kubernetes” is now sometimes used as a shorthand for an entire container environment based on Kubernetes. In reality, they are not directly comparable, have different roots, and solve for different things.

Docker is a platform and tool for building, distributing, and running Docker containers. It offers its own native clustering tool that can be used to orchestrate and schedule containers on machine clusters. 

Kubernetes is a container orchestration system for Docker containers that is more extensive than Docker Swarm and is meant to coordinate clusters of nodes at scale in production in an efficient manner. It works around the concept of pods, which are scheduling units (and can contain one or more containers) in the Kubernetes ecosystem, and they are distributed among nodes to provide high availability. One can easily run a Docker build on a Kubernetes cluster, but Kubernetes itself is not a complete solution and is meant to include custom plugins.