The Need for Orchestration Systems
While Docker provided an open standard for packaging and distributing containerized applications, there arose a new problem. How would all of these containers be coordinated and scheduled? How do all the different containers in your application communicate with each other? How can container instances be scaled?
Solutions for orchestrating containers soon emerged. Kubernetes, Mesos, and Docker Swarm are some of the more popular options for providing an abstraction to make a cluster of machines behave like one big machine, which is vital in a large-scale environment.
When most people talk about “Kubernetes vs. Docker,” what they really mean is “Kubernetes vs. Docker Swarm.” The latter is Docker’s own native clustering solution for Docker containers, which has the advantage of being tightly integrated into the ecosystem of Docker, and uses its own API. Like most schedulers, Docker Swarm provides a way to administer a large number of containers spread across clusters of servers. Its filtering and scheduling system enables the selection of optimal nodes in a cluster to deploy containers.
Kubernetes is the container orchestrator that was developed at Google which has been donated to the CNCF and is now open source. It has the advantage of leveraging Google’s years of expertise in container management. It is a comprehensive system for automating deployment, scheduling and scaling of containerized applications, and supports many containerization tools such as Docker.
For now, Kubernetes is the market leader and the standardized means of orchestrating containers and deploying distributed applications. Kubernetes can be run on a public cloud service or on-premises, is highly modular, open source, and has a vibrant community. Companies of all sizes are investing into it, and many cloud providers offer Kubernetes as a service. Sumo Logic provides support for all orchestration technologies, including Kubernetes-powered applications.