16

I have read some introduction of these projects, but still cannot get a clear idea of the difference between Kubernetes and Flynn/Deis. Can anyone help?

titanous
  • 3,668
  • 3
  • 27
  • 26
ming.kernel
  • 3,365
  • 3
  • 21
  • 32

1 Answers1

23

Kubernetes is really three things:

  • A way to dynamically schedule containers (actually, sets of containers called pods) to a cluster of machines.
  • Manage and horizontally scale a lot of those pods using labels and helpers (ReplicationController)
  • Communicate between sets of pods via services, expose a set of pods externally on a public IP and easily consume external services. This is necessary to deal with the horizontal scaling and the dynamic nature of how pods get placed/scheduled.

This is all very much a tool set for managing compute across a set of machines. It isn't a full application PaaS. Kubernetes doesn't have any idea what an "application" is. Generally PaaS systems provide an easy way to take code and get it deployed and managed as an application. In fact, I expect to see specialized PaaS systems built on top of Kubernetes -- that is what RedHat OpenShift is doing.

One way to think about Kubernetes is as a system for "logical" infrastructure (vs. traditional VM cloud systems which are

Joe Beda
  • 2,743
  • 1
  • 19
  • 16
  • 11
    As the creator of Deis I agree with Joe's explanation wholeheartedly. Deis (and other PaaS systems) provide a lifecycle management workflow for applications. This is focused on build and configuration management, collaboration features, etc. Deis has already begun prototyping container orchestration via Kubernetes as it provides a number of building blocks for PaaS including a declarative API, service discovery and replication controls. Here is a diagram that helps explain the stack from my perspective: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B33GFtNCUAE-vEX.png:large – gabrtv Dec 04 '14 at 02:40
  • @gabrtv What's the current scheduler (container orchestration) in Deis, is it built into Deis? – ming.kernel Dec 04 '14 at 03:24
  • @ming.kernel Deis currently uses CoreOS's Fleet. We will also be announcing support for scheduling via Mesos shortly. – gabrtv Dec 04 '14 at 04:50