Gone are the days, where large applications built on Monolithic Architecture are dependent on each service for full functionality of an application, or to service the end user. Well, you might have a question, what does monolithic architecture have to do with Docker or Kubernetes? Nowadays, where the whole application built on monolithic architecture is split in micro service architecture, for example where user management, catalogue or product management, order management is built as a separate micro service. Building this service with micro services has a huge benefit for production environments, whereas in traditional environments, any feature addition or changes in code will bring down the service or application. With micro services, the service is independent – any change would not affect or bring down the complete application.

This is where Docker comes to play. Running services in the traditional way (running each service on separate server) is not reliable or cost-effective way. Instead, with Docker – you can run multiple micro services within the same server or virtual machine. Docker containers are isolated – and you can run multiple Docker containers within the same server (or VPS).

Now, lets dive into the main topic of this post, Docker vs. Kubernetes.

Docker is a containerization platform, whereas Kubernetes is a container orchestrator. These two work together, as Kubernetes needs a container runtime in order to orchestrate.

Docker can run on a single server, whereas Kubernetes is designed to run across a cluster of multiple servers.

Docker use cases:

– Deployment of Portable applications
– Simple configuration
– Version tracking
– Automating building of docker images, instant deployment of applications.
– Isolation of application
– Cost consolidation of servers with ability use or share unused memory compared to Virtual machines.
– Faster deployment

Even though Docker is quite fast, light weight, and scalable, but there are some problems of itself when it comes to scalability and managing containers – especially when the number of containers are increased. To overcome the above challenges faced by Docker when deploying a large amount of containers, we need a specific way to manage them, so this is where Kubernetes comes in handy.

Kubernetes use cases:

– Horizontal Scaling of applications or containers
– Rollout or Rollback of deployment
– Configuration and secret management
– Self-Healing and Storage orchestration
– Load Balancing, unique DNS name for each service set of containers.

Thank you for taking time to read! We hope that the above post helps you in better understanding containers and Kubernetes in simple terms.

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