Swarm v. Fleet v. Kubernetes v. Mesos

Running a non-trivial software system is full of challenges. System resources need to scale up and down quickly to meet fluctuating user demand. Automatic fail-over to pre-provisioned back-up systems necessary for avoiding zero-downtime. With this practical report, you’ll examine how orchestration tools such as Swarm, Fleet, Kubernetes, and Apache Mesos can help you meet these needs in a quick and cost-effective way.

Adrian Mouat, Chief Scientist at Container Solutions, explains how each of these tools works within the cluster to start containers on appropriate hosts and then connect them together. In detail, you’ll explore:

• Swarm: native clustering tool that uses the standard Docker API
• Fleet: low-level cluster management tool that works with higher-level solutions such as Kubernetes
• Kubernetes: an opinionated container orchestration tool that enforces several concepts around how containers are organized and networked
• Apache Mesos: an open-source cluster manager designed to scale to very large clusters involving hundreds or thousands of hosts