Google notes that Kubernetes’ “main design goal is to make it easy to deploy and manage complex distributed systems, while still benefiting from the improved utilization that containers enable.”
Kubernetes was released as open source by Google in 2014 and is now widely considered to be the market leader and industry-standard orchestration tool for containers and distributed application deployment. Kubernetes was originally developed by Google, who needed a new way to run billions of containers a week at scale. Kubernetes can be used with or without Docker. Kubernetes (sometimes referred to as K8s) is a popular open source platform that orchestrates container runtime systems across a cluster of networked resources. These allow organizations to manage a large volume of containers and users, balance loads efficiently, offer authentication and security, multi-platform deployment, and more. To solve these problems and more, solutions to orchestrate containers emerged in the form of Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Mesos, HashiCorp Nomad, and others. Coordinating and scheduling containers across multiple servers/clusters, upgrading or deploying applications with zero downtime, and monitoring the health of containers are just some of the considerations that need to be made. While Docker provides an efficient way to package and distribute containerized applications, running and managing containers at scale is a challenge with Docker alone. These container images can then be deployed and run on any platform that supports containers, such as Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Mesos, or HashiCorp Nomad. Developers can create containers without Docker but the Docker platform makes it easier to do so. It uses a client-server architecture with simple commands and automation through a single API.ĭocker also provides a toolkit that is commonly used to package applications into immutable container images by writing a Dockerfile and then running the appropriate commands to build the image using the Docker server. Docker is a commercial containerization platform and runtime that helps developers build, deploy, and run containers.