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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Infrastructure as a Service
  4. Virtual Machine Management
  5. Kubernetes vs Vagrant

Kubernetes vs Vagrant

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Vagrant
Vagrant
Stacks11.9K
Followers7.8K
Votes1.5K
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Stacks61.2K
Followers52.8K
Votes685

Kubernetes vs Vagrant: What are the differences?

Introduction

Here, we will discuss the key differences between Kubernetes and Vagrant.

  1. Scalability and Orchestration: Kubernetes is designed for containerized application deployment, management, and scaling. It provides an out-of-the-box solution for orchestrating containerized workloads across a cluster of machines. On the other hand, Vagrant is a tool for creating and managing portable development environments. It focuses on providing consistent and reproducible development environments, rather than scaling and orchestrating containerized applications.

  2. Containerization Technology: Kubernetes utilizes containerization technology, such as Docker, to package applications and their dependencies. It provides features like service discovery, load balancing, and auto-scaling for containers. Vagrant, on the other hand, supports multiple virtualization technologies, including VirtualBox, VMware, and Hyper-V, to create and manage virtual machines.

  3. Infrastructure Abstraction: Kubernetes abstracts the underlying infrastructure, allowing developers to deploy and manage applications without worrying about the specific infrastructure details. It provides a uniform API for managing applications across different environments. Vagrant, on the other hand, focuses on providing a consistent development environment by abstracting the differences between development machines and targeted production environments.

  4. Community and Ecosystem: Kubernetes has a large and active community with extensive documentation, tutorials, and a wide range of third-party tools and integrations available. It is backed by major cloud providers like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Vagrant also has an active community, but it is relatively smaller compared to Kubernetes. However, Vagrant provides a rich ecosystem of plugins and supports a wide range of operating systems and tools.

  5. Deployment Complexity: Kubernetes is a complex system that requires a cluster of machines to run, along with additional components like etcd, kube-proxy, and kubelet. It requires knowledge of cluster management, networking, and distributed systems to set up and maintain. Vagrant, on the other hand, simplifies the deployment of virtual machines by providing a simple and declarative configuration file. It is easier to set up and does not require deep knowledge of distributed systems.

  6. Target Audience: Kubernetes targets organizations and developers who need to deploy and manage large-scale containerized applications in production environments. It is suitable for microservices architectures and cloud-native applications. Vagrant, on the other hand, is primarily targeted towards developers who want to create and manage portable development environments. It is commonly used for local development, testing, and sharing development configurations.

In summary, Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform designed for managing large-scale containerized applications, while Vagrant is a tool for creating and managing portable development environments. Kubernetes focuses on scaling, orchestrating containers, and providing infrastructure abstraction, while Vagrant focuses on providing consistent development environments and simplifying the deployment of virtual machines.

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Advice on Vagrant, Kubernetes

Simon
Simon

Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH

Apr 27, 2020

DecidedonGitHubGitHubGitHub PagesGitHub PagesMarkdownMarkdown

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.
12.8M views12.8M
Comments
Anis
Anis

Founder at Odix

Nov 7, 2020

Review

I recommend this : -Spring reactive for back end : the fact it's reactive (async) it consumes half of the resources that a sync platform needs (so less CPU -> less money). -Angular : Web Front end ; it's gives you the possibility to use PWA which is a cheap replacement for a mobile app (but more less popular). -Docker images. -Kubernetes to orchestrate all the containers. -I Use Jenkins / blueocean, ansible for my CI/CD (with Github of course) -AWS of course : u can run a K8S cluster there, make it multi AZ (availability zones) to be highly available, use a load balancer and an auto scaler and ur good to go. -You can store data by taking any managed DB or u can deploy ur own (cheap but risky).

You pay less money, but u need some technical 2 - 3 guys to make that done.

Good luck

115k views115k
Comments
Michael
Michael

CEO at asencis Ltd

Jan 5, 2021

Needs advice

We develop rapidly with docker-compose orchestrated services, however, for production - we utilise the very best ideas that Kubernetes has to offer: SCALE! We can scale when needed, setting a maximum and minimum level of nodes for each application layer - scaling only when the load balancer needs it. This allowed us to reduce our devops costs by 40% whilst also maintaining an SLA of 99.87%.

272k views272k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Vagrant
Vagrant
Kubernetes
Kubernetes

Vagrant provides the framework and configuration format to create and manage complete portable development environments. These development environments can live on your computer or in the cloud, and are portable between Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

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.

Boxes;Up And SSH;Synced Folders;Provisioning;Networking;Share;Teardown;Rebuild;Providers
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
Stacks
11.9K
Stacks
61.2K
Followers
7.8K
Followers
52.8K
Votes
1.5K
Votes
685
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 352
    Development environments
  • 290
    Simple bootstraping
  • 237
    Free
  • 139
    Boxes
  • 130
    Provisioning
Cons
  • 2
    Multiple VMs quickly eat up disk space
  • 2
    Can become v complex w prod. provisioner (Salt, etc.)
  • 1
    Development environment that kills your battery
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
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
HP Cloud Compute
HP Cloud Compute
Joyent Cloud
Joyent Cloud
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers
SoftLayer
SoftLayer
VirtualBox
VirtualBox
Docker
Docker
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
Ansible
Ansible
Google Kubernetes Engine
Google Kubernetes Engine

What are some alternatives to Vagrant, Kubernetes?

Rancher

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

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.

Docker Swarm

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

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

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.

boot2docker

boot2docker

boot2docker is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Tiny Core Linux made specifically to run Docker containers. It runs completely from RAM, weighs ~27MB and boots in ~5s (YMMV).

Codefresh

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.

CAST.AI

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.

Otto

Otto

Otto automatically builds development environments without any configuration; it can detect your project type and has built-in knowledge of industry-standard tools to setup a development environment that is ready to go. When you're ready to deploy, otto builds and manages an infrastructure, sets up servers, builds, and deploys the application.

libvirt

libvirt

It is an open-source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization. It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU and other virtualization technologies.

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