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What are the best Docker orchestration tools?

12

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Considered

92

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Sep 25, 2018

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

12 Options Considered

Best Docker orchestration tools	Price	Last Updated
88 Kubernetes	-	Jun 17, 2018
-- Docker Swarm	-	Sep 21, 2018
-- Docker Compose	-	Sep 25, 2018
-- Nomad	-	Sep 23, 2017
-- Marathon on Apache Mesos	-	Apr 14, 2017

Kubernetes

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Top Pro

Works well with modern operating systems

Kubernetes works very well with modern environments (such as CoreOS or Red Hat Atomc) which offer lightweight computing nodes that you don't have to manage, since they are managed for you. See More

Top Con

If used on an existing system, some re-organizing may be needed

Because of how opinionated Kubernetes is, it may be necessary to change some things if you decide to use Kubernetes as an orchestration tool in an existing application. See More

DelightfulKinieGer's Experience

Vibrant and Diversified dev community. Kubernetes is here to stay..Top tech giants seemt to have agreed to cooperate around the base technology and compete on higher level tools.. Recent CNCF's announcement wrt Top tech companies (like Google, Red Hat, CoreOS, FathomDB, ZTE Corporation, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Fujitsu, and Mirantis.) agreeing to a Kubernetes Certification standard is a major step towards having a dominant cloud agnostic Container Orchestration platform (and no fear or forks in the near-term). See More

Top Pro

Supported on several PaaS

Kubernetes is currently supported by Google Compute Engine, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, and vSphere. Work is being done to support Kubernetes on OpenShift and CloudFoundry. See More

Top Con

Sometimes Pods refuse to (re)start automatically

It happens that a Pod needs a manual kick before it runs properly, especially if you're near full utilisation of your machine resources. Sometimes it is just a long delay. See More

Elias Van Ootegem's Experience

docker + k8s have been, and will be the standard. It's production ready, and easy to use, and can only get better See More

Top Pro

Built on several years of experience with containers

Kubernetes was built on top of several years of experience from Google working on containers in production. It's a little opinionated on how containers should work and behave, but if used correctly it can help you achieve fault-tolerant systems. See More

Top Con

Cannot define containers through the Docker CLI

Kubernetes was not written for docker clustering alone. It uses a different API, configuration and different YAML definitions. So you can't use the Docker CLI or Docker Compose to define your containers. Everything has to be done from scratch. See More

Top Pro

Open Source

Kubernetes is free and open source. See More

Top Pro

Easy to do grouping tasks

Kubernetes uses labels which are key-value pairs that are attached to objects, usually pods. They are used to specify the characteristics of an object like the version, tier, etc. Labels are used to identify objects or groups of objects according to different characteristics that they may have, for example they can be used to identify all the pods that are included in the backend tier. Through labels it's easier to do grouping tasks for pods or containers, like moving pods to different groups or assigning them to load-balanced groups. See More

Top Pro

Fault tolerant

Almost everything in Kubernetes is designed to handle if parts of it fail or if your service crashed for whatever reason. So it's particularly adapted if you've a cluster (even a very small one). See More

Top Pro

Great starting point for beginners

Kubernetes great for beginners who are just starting to work on clustering. It's probably the quickest and easiest way to start experimenting and learning cluster oriented development. See More

Docker Swarm

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Easy setup

This also means that containers can be launched with a simple docker run command and Swarm will take care of the rest, such as selecting the appropriate host on which to run the container. See More

Top Con

Bounded by the limitations of the Docker API

If the Docker API doesn't support something, then you are pretty much out of luck when it comes to Docker Swarm, because it won't be supported by Swarm either. See More

Top Pro

Communicates with other Docker tools easily

Since Docker Swarm is a native Docker tool, it exposes the Docker API, making it possible t integrate it and communicate with other Docker tools (CLI, Compose, Krane, etc.). See More

Top Con

Not fault tolerant

If a node dies in your cluster, the containers on that node won't be restarted See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

Docker Swarm is much more lightweight than alternatives: Kubernetes and Mesosphere. Kubernetes, for instance, is very complex - it downloads and installs half of the web, where Docker Swarm has much, much smaller footprint. See More

Top Pro

Compatible with Docker Compose

This gives you a well-rounded workflow. See More

Top Pro

Open source

Docker Swarm is open source and provides great guides/documentation for those who want to contribute. See More

Docker Compose

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Easy setup

All that's needed to setup a multi-container application with Compose is a single file configuration file. Finally the application can be spun up with only a single command. See More

Top Con

Not ready for production yet

While Compose is very good for staging servers, CI and development environments, it's still not ready for production and it's not recommended to be used in production yet. See More

Top Pro

Great for local development

Docker-compose isn't really meant (yet) for distributed deployment, but using it to deploy a website locally for testing is awesome. You could use it, with care (like handling faults), on a single server as well. See More

Nomad

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Simple, minimal architecture

Being focused on one thing only also has its advantages. For one, Nomad is very simple architecturally. There's only a single binary for both clients and servers, it also does not need any external services for any coordination or storage. See More

Top Con

Only provides cluster management and scheduling

While other orchestration tools provide much more than just cluster management and scheduling (they also provide things like secrets management, discovery, monitoring, etc.), Nomad follows the Unix philosophy of doing only one thing and doing it well, providing only cluster management and scheduling. See More

Top Pro

Complex applications can easily be expressed through Nomad

Nomad uses a high-level abstraction of jobs. Jobs are essentially task groups (sets of tasks). Because of this, Nomad allows users to develop and manage complex applications easily, without having to think about the individual containers that make these applications. See More

OpenShift

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Official customer support is lacking

OpenShift seems to rely more on written documentation and on the community to solve any problem users may have. The forums and IRC channel are active and very helpful, but the official customer support could be better. See More

Top Pro

Built-in continuous integration

Continuous integration is not only built-in OpenShift, it's actually a standard part the workflow. See More

Top Pro

Small learning curve

Learning to use OpenShift is pretty easy. Most environments can be set up in a few simple steps and for everything else the official documentation and third-party resources are extremely helpful. See More

Top Pro

Can be used to introduce specialized tasks through the application hosted on it

Because of its high flexibility and customization power, OpenShift can be used to create specialized tasks for the application being hosted on it. For example, an entire array of dynos (also known as gears) can be dedicated to media transcoding in order to build a custom media converter infrastructure. See More

Lunchbadger

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Cloudify - Pure-Play Cloud Orchestration & Automation

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Amazon ECS

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Giant Swarm

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Very good documentation

Focuses on micro services (and not just containers). See More

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