Airship vs Kubernetes

Overview

Kubernetes

Stacks61.2K

Followers52.8K

Votes685

Airship

Stacks15

Followers39

Votes6

Airship vs Kubernetes: What are the differences?

# Introduction
In the world of container orchestration, both Airship and Kubernetes play significant roles, but they have distinct differences that cater to different needs and preferences. Understanding these key differences is crucial for businesses to make informed decisions about which platform to choose for their container management requirements.

1. **Architecture**:
Airship utilizes a bare-metal infrastructure to manage containerized workloads, offering more control and flexibility for organizations. On the other hand, Kubernetes operates on a cloud-based infrastructure, providing scalability and ease of management, especially for cloud-native applications.

2. **Customization**:
Airship allows for extensive customization and configuration options, enabling users to tailor the platform to meet specific requirements. In contrast, Kubernetes follows a more standardized approach with limited customization capabilities, making it easier to deploy but potentially less flexible in certain scenarios.

3. **Integrated Lifecycle Management**:
Airship is designed to handle the entire lifecycle of infrastructure and applications, from provisioning to deployment and beyond. Kubernetes, while offering robust deployment capabilities, may rely on additional tools or manual processes for certain lifecycle management tasks, requiring more effort from users.

4. **Community Support**:
Kubernetes benefits from a large and active community of developers and users, providing a wealth of resources, plugins, and support options. Airship, being a newer platform, has a smaller community footprint, which can impact the availability of resources and limit the diversity of solutions for users.

5. **Scalability**:
Kubernetes is renowned for its ability to scale effortlessly, supporting massive clusters of containers and accommodating dynamic workloads. Airship, while capable of scaling, may require more manual intervention and configuration to achieve the same level of scalability as Kubernetes.

6. **Ease of Adoption**:
Due to its popularity and widespread adoption, Kubernetes offers a lower barrier to entry for users, with abundant learning resources and established best practices. In contrast, Airship's relative novelty and specialized use cases may require a steeper learning curve for newcomers.

In Summary, understanding the differences between Airship and Kubernetes is crucial for organizations looking to select the right container orchestration platform that best suits their needs and preferences.

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Advice on Kubernetes, Airship

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

Kubernetes	Airship
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.	Airship is a modern product flagging framework that gives the right people total control over what your customers see & experience - without deploying code.
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	Launch control; Easy experimentation; Customer configurations; Testing & QA; Accelerate CI/CD; Trial campaigns
Statistics
Stacks 61.2K	Stacks 15
Followers 52.8K	Followers 39
Votes 685	Votes 6
Pros & Cons
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	Pros 2 Easy experimentation 2 Accelerate CI/CD 2 Launch control
Integrations
Vagrant Docker Rackspace Cloud Servers Microsoft Azure Google Compute Engine Ansible Google Kubernetes Engine	Java JavaScript Python Node.js Golang .NET Ruby

What are some alternatives to Kubernetes, Airship?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

ConfigCat

Cross-platform feature flag service for Teams. It is a hosted or on-premise service with a web app for feature management, and SDKs for all major programming languages and technologies.

Flocker

Flocker is a data volume manager and multi-host Docker cluster management tool. With it you can control your data using the same tools you use for your stateless applications. This means that you can run your databases, queues and key-value stores in Docker and move them around as easily as the rest of your app.

Related Comparisons

Airship vs Kubernetes: What are the differences?

# Introduction
In the world of container orchestration, both Airship and Kubernetes play significant roles, but they have distinct differences that cater to different needs and preferences. Understanding these key differences is crucial for businesses to make informed decisions about which platform to choose for their container management requirements.

1. **Architecture**:
Airship utilizes a bare-metal infrastructure to manage containerized workloads, offering more control and flexibility for organizations. On the other hand, Kubernetes operates on a cloud-based infrastructure, providing scalability and ease of management, especially for cloud-native applications.

2. **Customization**:
Airship allows for extensive customization and configuration options, enabling users to tailor the platform to meet specific requirements. In contrast, Kubernetes follows a more standardized approach with limited customization capabilities, making it easier to deploy but potentially less flexible in certain scenarios.

3. **Integrated Lifecycle Management**:
Airship is designed to handle the entire lifecycle of infrastructure and applications, from provisioning to deployment and beyond. Kubernetes, while offering robust deployment capabilities, may rely on additional tools or manual processes for certain lifecycle management tasks, requiring more effort from users.

4. **Community Support**:
Kubernetes benefits from a large and active community of developers and users, providing a wealth of resources, plugins, and support options. Airship, being a newer platform, has a smaller community footprint, which can impact the availability of resources and limit the diversity of solutions for users.

5. **Scalability**:
Kubernetes is renowned for its ability to scale effortlessly, supporting massive clusters of containers and accommodating dynamic workloads. Airship, while capable of scaling, may require more manual intervention and configuration to achieve the same level of scalability as Kubernetes.

6. **Ease of Adoption**:
Due to its popularity and widespread adoption, Kubernetes offers a lower barrier to entry for users, with abundant learning resources and established best practices. In contrast, Airship's relative novelty and specialized use cases may require a steeper learning curve for newcomers.

Airship vs Kubernetes

Overview