Capistrano vs Kubernetes

Overview

Capistrano

Stacks1.5K

Followers647

Votes232

GitHub Stars12.9K

Forks1.8K

Kubernetes

Stacks61.2K

Followers52.8K

Votes685

Capistrano vs Kubernetes: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will compare Capistrano and Kubernetes, two popular tools used for deploying and managing applications. While both Capistrano and Kubernetes serve similar purposes, they have key differences in terms of their architecture, features, and use cases.

Scalability: One of the key differences between Capistrano and Kubernetes is their scalability. Capistrano is primarily designed for deploying applications to a fixed set of servers, making it a good fit for small to medium-sized applications. On the other hand, Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that can scale applications automatically based on resource demand. It enables horizontal scaling, allowing applications to run on multiple nodes, making it suitable for large-scale deployments.
Containerization: Another significant difference is the approach to containerization. Capistrano is primarily targeted towards deploying applications to bare-metal servers or virtual machines, without specific support for containers. On the contrary, Kubernetes is built around containers and provides advanced features for managing containerized applications, such as automated deployment, scaling, and self-healing capabilities.
Deployment Strategies: Capistrano mainly relies on a sequential deployment strategy, where tasks are executed in a predefined order and usually involves a short downtime during the deployment process. In contrast, Kubernetes supports rolling updates, allowing applications to be updated without downtime. It uses techniques like traffic shifting and gradual rollout to ensure zero or minimal impact on the running services during the deployment.
Resource Governance and Abstraction: Kubernetes provides a higher level of resource governance and abstraction compared to Capistrano. It offers robust resource management features like resource quotas, limits, and namespaces, enabling better control over resource allocation and utilization. Capistrano, being a more simplistic tool, lacks these advanced resource management capabilities.
Infrastructure Portability: Kubernetes is designed to provide infrastructure portability, allowing applications to run consistently across different environments like on-premises data centers, public clouds, or hybrid clouds. It achieves this through a declarative approach and by abstracting the underlying infrastructure. On the contrary, Capistrano typically requires manual configuration and customization for each environment, making it less portable.
Community and Ecosystem: Kubernetes has gained immense popularity and has a vast and active community contributing to its development and maintenance. It has a rich ecosystem of tools and integrations, making it easier to extend its functionality. Capistrano, while also having a decent community, has a comparatively smaller ecosystem and may have limitations in terms of available integrations and community support.

In summary, Capistrano is a simpler tool focused on deploying applications to fixed server environments, while Kubernetes is a powerful container orchestration platform built for scalable and resilient application deployments across various environments.

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Advice on Capistrano, Kubernetes

Simon

Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH

Apr 27, 2020

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Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

@{GitHub}|tool:27| (incl. @{GitHub Pages}|tool:683|/@{Markdown}|tool:1147| for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
Respectively @{Git}|tool:1046| as revision control system
@{SourceTree}|tool:1599| as @{Git}|tool:1046| GUI
@{Visual Studio Code}|tool:4202| as IDE
@{CircleCI}|tool:190| for continuous integration (automatize development process)
@{Prettier}|tool:7035| / @{TSLint}|tool:5561| / @{ESLint}|tool:3337| as code linter
@{SonarQube}|tool:2638| as quality gate
@{Docker}|tool:586| as container management (incl. @{Docker Compose}|tool:3136| for multi-container application management)
@{VirtualBox}|tool:774| for operating system simulation tests
@{Kubernetes}|tool:1885| as cluster management for docker containers
@{Heroku}|tool:133| for deploying in test environments
@{nginx}|tool:1052| as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
@{SSLMate}|tool:2752| (using @{OpenSSL}|tool:3091|) for certificate management
@{Amazon EC2}|tool:18| (incl. @{Amazon S3}|tool:25|) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
@{PostgreSQL}|tool:1028| as preferred database system
@{Redis}|tool:1031| as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.

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Detailed Comparison

Capistrano	Kubernetes
Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.	Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.
Reliably deploy web application to any number of machines simultaneously, in sequence or as a rolling set;Automate audits of any number of machines (checking login logs, enumerating uptimes, and/or applying security patches);Script arbitrary workflows over SSH;Automate common tasks in software teams;Drive infrastructure provisioning tools such as chef-solo, Ansible or similar	Lightweight, simple and accessible;Built for a multi-cloud world, public, private or hybrid;Highly modular, designed so that all of its components are easily swappable
Statistics
GitHub Stars 12.9K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 1.8K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 1.5K	Stacks 61.2K
Followers 647	Followers 52.8K
Votes 232	Votes 685
Pros & Cons
Pros 121 Automated deployment with several custom recipes 63 Simple 23 Ruby 11 Release-folders with symlinks 9 Multistage deployment	Pros 166 Leading docker container management solution 130 Simple and powerful 108 Open source 76 Backed by google 58 The right abstractions Cons 16 Steep learning curve 15 Poor workflow for development 8 Orchestrates only infrastructure 4 High resource requirements for on-prem clusters 2 Too heavy for simple systems
Integrations
No integrations available	Vagrant Docker Rackspace Cloud Servers Microsoft Azure Google Compute Engine Ansible Google Kubernetes Engine

What are some alternatives to Capistrano, Kubernetes?

Ansible

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.

Rancher

Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.

Docker Compose

With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.

Chef

Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.

Terraform

With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.

Docker Swarm

Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.

Tutum

Tutum lets developers easily manage and run lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. AWS-like control, Heroku-like ease. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale in Tutum.

Puppet Labs

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

Salt

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

Portainer

It is a universal container management tool. It works with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm and Azure ACI. It allows you to manage containers without needing to know platform-specific code.

Related Comparisons

Capistrano vs Kubernetes: What are the differences?

Introduction

Scalability: One of the key differences between Capistrano and Kubernetes is their scalability. Capistrano is primarily designed for deploying applications to a fixed set of servers, making it a good fit for small to medium-sized applications. On the other hand, Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that can scale applications automatically based on resource demand. It enables horizontal scaling, allowing applications to run on multiple nodes, making it suitable for large-scale deployments.
Containerization: Another significant difference is the approach to containerization. Capistrano is primarily targeted towards deploying applications to bare-metal servers or virtual machines, without specific support for containers. On the contrary, Kubernetes is built around containers and provides advanced features for managing containerized applications, such as automated deployment, scaling, and self-healing capabilities.
Deployment Strategies: Capistrano mainly relies on a sequential deployment strategy, where tasks are executed in a predefined order and usually involves a short downtime during the deployment process. In contrast, Kubernetes supports rolling updates, allowing applications to be updated without downtime. It uses techniques like traffic shifting and gradual rollout to ensure zero or minimal impact on the running services during the deployment.
Resource Governance and Abstraction: Kubernetes provides a higher level of resource governance and abstraction compared to Capistrano. It offers robust resource management features like resource quotas, limits, and namespaces, enabling better control over resource allocation and utilization. Capistrano, being a more simplistic tool, lacks these advanced resource management capabilities.
Infrastructure Portability: Kubernetes is designed to provide infrastructure portability, allowing applications to run consistently across different environments like on-premises data centers, public clouds, or hybrid clouds. It achieves this through a declarative approach and by abstracting the underlying infrastructure. On the contrary, Capistrano typically requires manual configuration and customization for each environment, making it less portable.
Community and Ecosystem: Kubernetes has gained immense popularity and has a vast and active community contributing to its development and maintenance. It has a rich ecosystem of tools and integrations, making it easier to extend its functionality. Capistrano, while also having a decent community, has a comparatively smaller ecosystem and may have limitations in terms of available integrations and community support.

Capistrano vs Kubernetes

Overview

Capistrano vs Kubernetes: What are the differences?