Why FP Complete chose Kubernetes for Container Orchestration in Kube360
While it is a small competition field, alternatives to Kubernetes for
container orchestration exist and have their own merits and drawbacks.
Today, we'll cover the major players and explain why FP Complete
ultimately decided to base
Kube360 on its namesake,
Kubernetes.
When companies and organizations move towards containerized workflows
for their software and applications, various options exist to handle
these containers' deployments and day-to-day management. Which option a
company decides to use has an enormous impact on its long-run success.
The container orchestration tools currently available take their
different approaches to how developers can deploy new placements,
monitor existing apps, and handle and debug failures.
Kubernetes and its advantages
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system initially
designed by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing
Foundation. Google, Red Hat, and many other major tech companies
currently develop Kubernetes, along with a large community of
open-source contributors.
Kubernetes provides container scheduling, cluster management, logging
and monitoring, service discovery, secrets management, and other
services that Docker-based containerized applications require.
Kubernetes' container orchestration functionality is comprised of a
collection of interoperating services. These services provide a layer of
abstraction over the underlying servers, storage, and other cloud
infrastructure components that the containerized applications need to
operate. To do this, Kubernetes defines a set of primitives, known as
Objects, that can be used to manage the underlying resources at a high
level. This action provides a cloud provider with an agnostic layer
where each container workflow's setup and deployment (and the services
they require) are defined in terms of these Kubernetes Objects.
A significant advantage Kubernetes has over its cloud orchestration
competitors is the ecosystem of specialized services, tools, and other
DevOps applications explicitly written with Kubernetes in mind. Because
Kubernetes has become the de-facto standard for container orchestration,
there is a wide variety of options to choose from for various parts of a
typical DevOps deployment.
Competitors to Kubernetes
Nomad
Nomad is currently the most robust alternative to Kubernetes but
significantly lacks in terms of adoption and support. Nomad is an
open-source container orchestration system developed by HashiCorp and
mainly targets the same use cases as Kubernetes. Besides adoption, where
Kubernetes and Nomad primarily differ is in their implementation.
Whereas Kubernetes is a collection of interoperating pieces, Nomad is a
single monolithic binary. In Kubernetes, the service that handles
coordination and storage is separate from the API controllers that take
care of the state. With Nomad, the resource manager, and scheduler and
wrapped into a single system. Nomad's design focuses on being more of a
pure scheduler. As a result, it leaves out the complexity that can come
with the Kubernetes networking model.
Given Nomad's less widespread adoption and a smaller community, the
existential risk with Nomad is that HashiCorp could go under and leave
Nomad unsupported. With Kubernetes, this risk is minimal since many
major companies have committed to supporting Kubernetes' development and
adoption. Nomad lacks development support and features behind it,
which hinders the adoption of the overall product.
Docker Compose and Docker Swarm
Docker Compose may seem like an odd choice to include on this list.
However, it targets a similar use case as Kubernetes in a far more
limited way. Docker Compose is a tool that allows multi-container
deployments to be defined in a single file. Docker Compose can then be
used to create and start all the services described in this file.
Docker Compose is typically used for limited development, prototyping,
and testing use cases but combines with Docker Swarm for larger
deployments. Docker Swarm is another container orchestration tool
comprised of a Swarm manager and individual container nodes. Docker
Swarm development has recently slowed, and the project and its platform
will likely cease to be supported soon.
Apache Mesos with Marathon
Apache Mesos is a resource manager typically used in tandem with a
Marathon framework, which provides a container orchestration platform.
In this setup, Marathon depends on Mesos to provide resource management.
Mesos with Marathon faces similar issues to Nomad regarding the
community support and development energy behind it. Additionally, users
may also find that significant and sometimes simple features they need
are locked away in Marathon's enterprise version.
The risk of locked features or functionality into the proprietary
enterprise version of Kubernetes does not exist. Once a user has
adopted Kubernetes and defined their containerized applications in
Kubernetes Objects, they are free to switch between different Kubernetes
deployment services.
Why Kubernetes is the best choice for Kube360
FP Complete chose Kubernetes because it was the best container
orchestration system to build Kube360. Kubernetes provided FP Complete
the right material and ingredients to create a competitive product.
Kubernetes stood out as #1 due to its dual requirements of being well
adopted and supported by the DevOps community and, at the same time, not
beholden to one company and its financial interests. To learn more about
Kube360, visit our overview
article or contact us for a free demo today.
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