Docker Swarm vs linkerd

Overview

Docker Swarm

Stacks779

Followers990

Votes282

linkerd

Stacks132

Followers312

Votes7

Docker Swarm vs linkerd: What are the differences?

Introduction

Docker Swarm and linkerd are two popular containerization technologies used for managing and orchestrating containerized applications. While both have similar functionalities, there are some key differences between them.

Scalability:
- Docker Swarm: Docker Swarm offers scalable features such as scaling up or down services and tasks based on the workload. It provides a built-in orchestration mechanism that allows running multiple containers across a cluster of machines.
- linkerd: Linkerd, on the other hand, primarily focuses on service mesh capabilities and provides advanced routing, load balancing, and traffic management features. It enables fine-grained control over how services communicate and routes traffic between them.
Service Discovery:
- Docker Swarm: Docker Swarm supports its own in-built service discovery mechanism. It automatically assigns a DNS name to each service running within the swarm, allowing other services to discover and communicate with them.
- linkerd: Linkerd integrates with service discovery tools like Consul or Kubernetes to dynamically discover and route traffic between services. It provides more flexibility by leveraging existing service discovery mechanisms.
Routing and Load Balancing:
- Docker Swarm: Docker Swarm offers built-in load balancing capabilities. It automatically distributes incoming requests across the services within the swarm using round-robin or source IP hashing algorithms.
- linkerd: Linkerd provides advanced traffic routing and load balancing features. It offers weighted load balancing, latency-aware routing, and circuit breaking to enhance performance and reliability.
Health Monitoring and Metrics:
- Docker Swarm: Docker Swarm provides basic health monitoring through the Swarm Manager. It monitors the status of services and automatically restarts them if they fail. However, it may require additional monitoring tools to gather metrics and health statistics.
- linkerd: Linkerd offers comprehensive observability features, including health monitoring, metrics collection, and distributed tracing. It provides real-time insights into service performance and helps identify potential bottlenecks or issues.
Security and Authentication:
- Docker Swarm: Docker Swarm includes built-in security features such as role-based access control (RBAC), encryption of network traffic, and secure storage of secrets. It also supports integration with external identity providers like LDAP or Active Directory.
- linkerd: Linkerd focuses on securing service communication within the mesh. It provides mTLS (mutual Transport Layer Security) authentication, which ensures that only trusted services can communicate with each other. It also supports integration with external authentication and authorization systems.
Community Support and Ecosystem:
- Docker Swarm: Docker Swarm benefits from the extensive Docker community and ecosystem. It is widely adopted and has a rich set of tools, libraries, and resources available.
- linkerd: Linkerd has a smaller but growing community of users and contributors. It has a dedicated team of maintainers and benefits from integration with other CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) projects like Kubernetes.

In Summary, Docker Swarm offers scalable orchestration capabilities, while linkerd focuses on providing advanced service mesh features for traffic management and observability.

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Advice on Docker Swarm, linkerd

Simon

Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH

Apr 27, 2020

Decidedon

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Markdown

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

Docker Swarm	linkerd
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.	linkerd is an out-of-process network stack for microservices. It functions as a transparent RPC proxy, handling everything needed to make inter-service RPC safe and sane--including load-balancing, service discovery, instrumentation, and routing.
-	Adaptive load-balancing;Fine-grained instrumentation;Abstractions over service discovery;Runtime traffic routing;Tech that's built for scale
Statistics
Stacks 779	Stacks 132
Followers 990	Followers 312
Votes 282	Votes 7
Pros & Cons
Pros 55 Docker friendly 46 Easy to setup 40 Standard Docker API 38 Easy to use 23 Native Cons 9 Low adoption	Pros 3 CNCF Project 1 Light Weight 1 Service Mesh 1 Fast Integration 1 Pre-check permissions
Integrations
Docker	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Docker Swarm, linkerd?

Kubernetes

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.

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.

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.

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.

Istio

Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc.

Codefresh

Automate and parallelize testing. Codefresh allows teams to spin up on-demand compositions to run unit and integration tests as part of the continuous integration process. Jenkins integration allows more complex pipelines.

Azure Service Fabric

Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices. Service Fabric addresses the significant challenges in developing and managing cloud apps.

CAST.AI

It is an AI-driven cloud optimization platform for Kubernetes. Instantly cut your cloud bill, prevent downtime, and 10X the power of DevOps.

k3s

Certified Kubernetes distribution designed for production workloads in unattended, resource-constrained, remote locations or inside IoT appliances. Supports something as small as a Raspberry Pi or as large as an AWS a1.4xlarge 32GiB server.

Related Comparisons

Docker Swarm vs linkerd: What are the differences?

Introduction

Scalability:
- Docker Swarm: Docker Swarm offers scalable features such as scaling up or down services and tasks based on the workload. It provides a built-in orchestration mechanism that allows running multiple containers across a cluster of machines.
- linkerd: Linkerd, on the other hand, primarily focuses on service mesh capabilities and provides advanced routing, load balancing, and traffic management features. It enables fine-grained control over how services communicate and routes traffic between them.
Service Discovery:
- Docker Swarm: Docker Swarm supports its own in-built service discovery mechanism. It automatically assigns a DNS name to each service running within the swarm, allowing other services to discover and communicate with them.
- linkerd: Linkerd integrates with service discovery tools like Consul or Kubernetes to dynamically discover and route traffic between services. It provides more flexibility by leveraging existing service discovery mechanisms.
Routing and Load Balancing:
- Docker Swarm: Docker Swarm offers built-in load balancing capabilities. It automatically distributes incoming requests across the services within the swarm using round-robin or source IP hashing algorithms.
- linkerd: Linkerd provides advanced traffic routing and load balancing features. It offers weighted load balancing, latency-aware routing, and circuit breaking to enhance performance and reliability.
Health Monitoring and Metrics:
- Docker Swarm: Docker Swarm provides basic health monitoring through the Swarm Manager. It monitors the status of services and automatically restarts them if they fail. However, it may require additional monitoring tools to gather metrics and health statistics.
- linkerd: Linkerd offers comprehensive observability features, including health monitoring, metrics collection, and distributed tracing. It provides real-time insights into service performance and helps identify potential bottlenecks or issues.
Security and Authentication:
- Docker Swarm: Docker Swarm includes built-in security features such as role-based access control (RBAC), encryption of network traffic, and secure storage of secrets. It also supports integration with external identity providers like LDAP or Active Directory.
- linkerd: Linkerd focuses on securing service communication within the mesh. It provides mTLS (mutual Transport Layer Security) authentication, which ensures that only trusted services can communicate with each other. It also supports integration with external authentication and authorization systems.
Community Support and Ecosystem:
- Docker Swarm: Docker Swarm benefits from the extensive Docker community and ecosystem. It is widely adopted and has a rich set of tools, libraries, and resources available.
- linkerd: Linkerd has a smaller but growing community of users and contributors. It has a dedicated team of maintainers and benefits from integration with other CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) projects like Kubernetes.

In Summary, Docker Swarm offers scalable orchestration capabilities, while linkerd focuses on providing advanced service mesh features for traffic management and observability.

Docker Swarm vs linkerd

Overview

Docker Swarm vs linkerd: What are the differences?