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Comment by brianwawok | Hacker News Reader

Heard this elsewhere. Why do people use Docker swarm with Kubernetes around? Does it require less setup or something?

I see two reasons for this:

- If you don't use google container engine (hosted kubernetes, also known as GKE), kubernetes have a reputation of being hard to set up. I am running on GKE, so I can't comment too much.

- It's hard to see how all of the orchestration/docker/etc. things play together when entering the area. I expect many people hear "docker" and want to just try "docker", not being aware that there exist alternatives for some parts, some parts are more reliable that others, etc. E.g. the article we are discussing seem to be doing this.

Kubernetes definitely runs best on GKE, but projects like kops (https://github.com/kubernetes/kops) are making setups on AWS etc. a lot easier.

You still have to deal with the other drawbacks of those platforms (slow networks, disks etc.) but that's not really a k8s issue.

> kubernetes have a reputation of being hard to set up

Yeah, but there's no shortage of things wrapping Kuber (e.g. OpenShift).

Kubernetes seems very unwieldy and hard to wrap my head around. Swarm seems straightforward and easy to figure out how to configure.

Let's give it a try and see if I can find a good tutorial for kubernetes to do what I want. (I haven't tried this experiment in a couple months, since before nomad and swarm got my interest.)

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Ok, I'm back. I went to kubernetes.io. there' "give it a try" has me creating a google account and getting set up on google container engine. Due to standard issue google account hassles, I quickly got mired in quicksand having nothing to do with kubernetes.

I have no interest in google container engine. Let me set it up using vagrant, or my own VPSes, or as a demo locally, whatever, I'll set up virtual boxes.

They lost me there.

What are standard Google account hassles? The k8s getting started guide is one of the single best cloud setup guides I've ever read. You've deployed your app, and can easily leverage the concepts listed their to deploy more complex apps.

K8s might seem more unwieldy than swarm, but from that feature set you can expect things to work the way they are explained.

Swarm on the other hand has made my entire team question whether 1.12 is even worth upgrading to.

Completely 100% disagree that the getting started guide is easy. Let's go through this by the numbers. First off specifically comparing the guides, the Docker 1.12 stuff works ANYWHERE you have root access. When I go here I'm totally confused:

http://kubernetes.io/docs/getting-started-guides/

Ok, let's see, not only do I immediately get diverted to another page, but I feel like every OS+Cloud combination isn't represented. I guess the CLOSEST thing to working is Ubuntu+AWS. Click.

http://kubernetes.io/docs/getting-started-guides/juju/

YAY! JUJU a new technology I need to learn. Hey guess what, this only works with Ubuntu. Closes browser. I spent weeks trying to map this out in my head. I can't understand why Kub doesn't just "install" like Docker does.

Ok, back to the deployment guide. Let's see there's a GIANT TABLE OF LINKS based on cloud+OS+whatever. So I think it's a massive understatement to say that Kub is more unwieldy than Swarm 1.12.

The docs are more of an encyclopedia: a lot of facts, not a lot of editorializing. Unless you enjoy learning from encyclopedias, I would highly recommend talking to other members of the community on the kubernetes slack (kubernetes-novice, kubernetes-user or for AWS sig-aws). That way you can quickly find what has worked well for people and what hasn't, and hopefully save yourself a ton of time.

I would love for our docs to be better - good people are working on it though documentation is always hard. In the meantime, the community is a wonderful resource!

The thing is, the docker stuff might be simple, but it doesn't actually work. Or at least the networking portion doesn't work as advertised.

http://kubernetes.io/docs/hellonode/ Is the guide that I was taking about. From your post it was not clear that you weren't using gce.

Check out minikube: github.com/kubernetes/minikube

It's a local setup to let you give Kubernetes a try. We haven't made it the default in the "give it a try" dialog yet, but we're considering it.

Disclosure: I'm an engineer at Google and I work on Minikube.

I found the Minikube getting started to be a good experience about a month ago. If you did make Minikube the default for "give it a try" that would instantly gain k8s more credibility in my eyes, as it calls attention to the excellent tooling around k8s, diminishes the perception of GKE as the only first-class k8s environment (ahem, lock-in!), and promotes the notion of an economical and fast k8s development environment.

It isn't directly linked from the front page, but they have a getting started section [0] that covers non-GKE options. I run k8s on AWS using the Kops tool.

Kubernetes is definitely more to learn before getting started than swarm, but that's mostly because it has different and more powerful primitives and more features built in.

[0]: http://kubernetes.io/docs/getting-started-guides/

You can have a swarm with only a handful of commands now, with TLS (for docker api). Eventually stable docker host to docker host container networking will have encryption out of the box too. The number of steps for a production docker setup keeps getting shorter and shorter, kubernetes seems to be now focused on this aspect, they might catch up. This is all of course ignoring the IaaS solutions and obviously for the reasons stated in the article, swarm doesn't see those benefits with 1.12 because major features do not work yet which are supposedly stable.

Yeah setup time is great. However, it seems that the number of commands required for stability with docker swarm -> ∞

I used it because I didn't understand what I needed and wanted to stay in the Docker ecosystem to try to limit tooling issues. Kubernetes sounded like more than I needed given what Swarm offered. Turned out alright because I was able to learn a lot, but Docker tools aren't as great as they make them sound (nothing is production ready and devs are too constrained to improve anything). I've moved up to kube and feel like I would have saved a month if I'd gone with it in the first place.

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