Kubernetes vs Docker: a Quick Comparison

Kubernetes and Docker are different technologies that may work separately—but they’re best paired to facilitate high scalability and availability in containerized applications.

While Docker specifically manages containers on individual nodes, Kubernetes helps you automate tasks like load balancing, scaling, container provisioning, and networking across several hosts within a cluster.

Increasing organizational best practices patterns also suggests integrating Kubernetes and Docker to create an isolation mechanism that lets you augment container resources more efficiently. With these constructs, developers can collaborate on complex projects without having to replicate the entire application in their respective IDEs.

(This article is part of our Kubernetes Guide. Use the right-hand menu to navigate.)

Docker overview

Docker is an open-source containerization platform that simplifies the deployment of applications on any computing infrastructure. While there is a host of other containerized technologies worldwide, Docker continues to be the most popular Platform as a Service for application build and deployment.

Through a text file format (dockerfile), Docker lets you package applications as self-sufficient, portable components that you can easily deploy on-premises or on the cloud. Docker’s runtime environment, the Docker Engine, allows developers to build applications on any machine and share images through a registry for faster deployments.

Kubernetes overview

As applications scale up in size, they require multiple containers hosted on distributed servers. When many distributed containers make operating the application tedious and complicated, Kubernetes forms a framework that efficiently controls how containers run.

Besides allowing your containers to run, Kubernetes also solves issues that arise when scaling several distributed containers by orchestrating a cluster of virtual machines (VMs) and creates a schedule for running containers on each VM. To manage container schedules and computing resources, Kubernetes:

• Provides an application programming interface (API)
• Maintains high availability through advanced autoscaling and automatic load balancing