Docker vs Supervisord

Overview

Docker

Stacks194.2K

Followers143.8K

Votes3.9K

Supervisord

Stacks117

Followers112

Votes0

GitHub Stars8.9K

Forks1.3K

Docker vs Supervisord: What are the differences?

1. Image vs Process management: Docker is primarily used for packaging applications into lightweight, portable containers known as Docker images. These images contain everything needed to run an application, including the code, runtime, system tools, and libraries. On the other hand, Supervisord is a process manager that helps in controlling and monitoring multiple processes within a single OS instance. It ensures that specified processes are running and provides a mechanism to start, stop, and restart them.
2. Isolation vs Process control: Docker provides containerization, which offers significant isolation between different applications or services running on the same host. Each Docker container runs separately and has its own isolated resources, such as filesystem, network stack, and process space. Conversely, Supervisord does not provide isolation between processes. It is primarily focused on process control, helping to manage and control individual processes on a single OS instance.
3. Scalability: Docker offers a scalable solution by allowing the deployment of multiple containers across different hosts, forming a Docker swarm or Kubernetes cluster. This enables horizontal scaling of applications, as containers can be easily replicated and distributed across multiple machines. On the other hand, Supervisord is not designed for managing large-scale deployments and is more suited for managing processes within a single host.
4. Application Packaging: Docker is widely used for application packaging and distribution. It allows developers to build container images containing all the dependencies and configurations required for an application to run consistently in any environment. Supervisord, on the other hand, does not provide a packaging mechanism and requires manual configuration on each host where it is used.
5. Portability: Docker provides a high level of portability, allowing containers to run on any host that has Docker installed, regardless of the underlying operating system. This is achieved through the use of containerization technologies such as namespaces and control groups. Supervisord, being primarily focused on process management within a single host, does not offer the same level of portability as Docker.
6. Ecosystem and Community: Docker has a large and active community, with extensive documentation, tutorials, and a wide range of pre-built Docker images available in the Docker Hub. This makes it easier for developers to find solutions and troubleshoot issues. On the other hand, Supervisord does not have as large of a community or ecosystem, which may make it more challenging to find resources or support.

In Summary, Docker provides image-based isolation, scalability, packaging, portability, and a vibrant community, while Supervisord focuses on process control within a single host.

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Advice on Docker, Supervisord

Florian

IT DevOp at Agitos GmbH

Oct 22, 2019

Decided

lxd/lxc and Docker aren't congruent so this comparison needs a more detailed look; but in short I can say: the lxd-integrated administration of storage including zfs with its snapshot capabilities as well as the system container (multi-process) approach of lxc vs. the limited single-process container approach of Docker is the main reason I chose lxd over Docker.

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Detailed Comparison

Docker	Supervisord
The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere	It allows its users to monitor and control a number of processes on UNIX-like operating systems. It shares some of the same goals of programs like launchd, daemontools, and runit. it is meant to be used to control processes related to a project or a customer, and is meant to start like any other program at boot time.
Integrated developer tools; open, portable images; shareable, reusable apps; framework-aware builds; standardized templates; multi-environment support; remote registry management; simple setup for Docker and Kubernetes; certified Kubernetes; application templates; enterprise controls; secure software supply chain; industry-leading container runtime; image scanning; access controls; image signing; caching and mirroring; image lifecycle; policy-based image promotion	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 8.9K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 1.3K
Stacks 194.2K	Stacks 117
Followers 143.8K	Followers 112
Votes 3.9K	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 823 Rapid integration and build up 692 Isolation 521 Open source 505 Testability and reproducibility 460 Lightweight Cons 8 New versions == broken features 6 Documentation not always in sync 6 Unreliable networking 4 Moves quickly 3 Not Secure	No community feedback yet
Integrations
Java Docker Compose VirtualBox Linux Amazon EC2 Container Service Docker Swarm boot2docker Kubernetes Docker Machine Vagrant	macOS FreeBSD Linux

What are some alternatives to Docker, Supervisord?

Grafana

Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.

Kibana

Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.

Prometheus

Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.

Nagios

Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

Netdata

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It's designed to run on all of your physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters & edge/IoT devices, to monitor systems, containers & apps

LXD

LXD isn't a rewrite of LXC, in fact it's building on top of LXC to provide a new, better user experience. Under the hood, LXD uses LXC through liblxc and its Go binding to create and manage the containers. It's basically an alternative to LXC's tools and distribution template system with the added features that come from being controllable over the network.

Zabbix

Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

Sensu

Sensu is the future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline empowers businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain deep visibility into their multi-cloud environments.

Graphite

Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand

Lumigo

Lumigo is an observability platform built for developers, unifying distributed tracing with payload data, log management, and real-time metrics to help you deeply understand and troubleshoot your systems.

Related Comparisons

Docker vs Supervisord: What are the differences?

1. Image vs Process management: Docker is primarily used for packaging applications into lightweight, portable containers known as Docker images. These images contain everything needed to run an application, including the code, runtime, system tools, and libraries. On the other hand, Supervisord is a process manager that helps in controlling and monitoring multiple processes within a single OS instance. It ensures that specified processes are running and provides a mechanism to start, stop, and restart them.
2. Isolation vs Process control: Docker provides containerization, which offers significant isolation between different applications or services running on the same host. Each Docker container runs separately and has its own isolated resources, such as filesystem, network stack, and process space. Conversely, Supervisord does not provide isolation between processes. It is primarily focused on process control, helping to manage and control individual processes on a single OS instance.
3. Scalability: Docker offers a scalable solution by allowing the deployment of multiple containers across different hosts, forming a Docker swarm or Kubernetes cluster. This enables horizontal scaling of applications, as containers can be easily replicated and distributed across multiple machines. On the other hand, Supervisord is not designed for managing large-scale deployments and is more suited for managing processes within a single host.
4. Application Packaging: Docker is widely used for application packaging and distribution. It allows developers to build container images containing all the dependencies and configurations required for an application to run consistently in any environment. Supervisord, on the other hand, does not provide a packaging mechanism and requires manual configuration on each host where it is used.
5. Portability: Docker provides a high level of portability, allowing containers to run on any host that has Docker installed, regardless of the underlying operating system. This is achieved through the use of containerization technologies such as namespaces and control groups. Supervisord, being primarily focused on process management within a single host, does not offer the same level of portability as Docker.
6. Ecosystem and Community: Docker has a large and active community, with extensive documentation, tutorials, and a wide range of pre-built Docker images available in the Docker Hub. This makes it easier for developers to find solutions and troubleshoot issues. On the other hand, Supervisord does not have as large of a community or ecosystem, which may make it more challenging to find resources or support.

In Summary, Docker provides image-based isolation, scalability, packaging, portability, and a vibrant community, while Supervisord focuses on process control within a single host.

Docker vs Supervisord

Overview