Composer vs Kubernetes

Overview

Composer

Stacks1.2K

Followers559

Votes13

GitHub Stars29.2K

Forks4.7K

Kubernetes

Stacks61.2K

Followers52.8K

Votes685

Composer vs Kubernetes: What are the differences?

Introduction: Composer and Kubernetes are both popular tools used in the world of software development and deployment. While they serve similar purposes in managing and orchestrating applications, there are key differences between the two.

Architecture: Composer is a dependency management tool for PHP that allows developers to manage and install third-party libraries and packages in their projects. It works at the application level and is primarily used during the development phase. On the other hand, Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that manages and scales containerized applications across a cluster of servers. It focuses on managing the deployment and runtime of applications in production environments.
Level of Abstraction: Composer operates at a higher level of abstraction as it deals with the dependencies and libraries required by an application, ensuring that the correct versions are installed and compatible with each other. Kubernetes, on the other hand, works at a lower level of abstraction by managing containers and their resources, providing functionalities like load balancing, scaling, and automatic failure recovery.
Scope of Management: Composer primarily focuses on managing applications and their dependencies within a single development environment. It resolves and installs dependencies based on the project configuration file. In contrast, Kubernetes is designed for managing complex containerized applications across multiple environments, including test and production environments. It supports the deployment and management of multiple services and containers that collectively form an application.
Scaling and Load Balancing: Kubernetes provides built-in support for scaling applications horizontally and vertically by adjusting the number of replicas and resources assigned to each container. It also offers built-in load balancing capabilities to distribute traffic across multiple instances of an application. Composer, on the other hand, does not provide native scaling or load balancing features as it is primarily used for local development and dependency management.
Monitoring and Logging: Kubernetes offers extensive monitoring and logging capabilities through integration with various tools and technologies like Prometheus and Elasticsearch. It provides metrics and logs for monitoring and troubleshooting applications running in the cluster. Composer, being a dependency management tool, does not have built-in monitoring and logging features as it focuses on managing code dependencies rather than application runtime.
Deployment Flexibility: Kubernetes supports a wide range of deployment strategies, including rolling updates, blue-green deployments, and canary releases. It allows for seamless deployment of new versions and updates without interrupting the running application. Composer, being a development tool, does not provide deployment strategies as it is primarily concerned with resolving dependencies and managing libraries.

In summary, Composer is a PHP dependency management tool used during development, while Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that manages and scales containerized applications in production environments. Composer operates at a higher abstraction level, focusing on resolving and managing dependencies, while Kubernetes operates at a lower level, managing containers and their resources. Kubernetes offers features like scaling, load balancing, monitoring, and deployment flexibility, which are not provided by Composer.

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Advice on Composer, 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

Composer	Kubernetes
It is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them for you.	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.
Locally; Globally	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 29.2K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 4.7K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 1.2K	Stacks 61.2K
Followers 559	Followers 52.8K
Votes 13	Votes 685
Pros & Cons
Pros 7 Must have dependency manager for PHP 3 Centralized autoload.php 3 Large number of libraries	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
PhpStorm Linux JavaScript PHP PuPHPet MySQL ReactPHP macOS	Vagrant Docker Rackspace Cloud Servers Microsoft Azure Google Compute Engine Ansible Google Kubernetes Engine

What are some alternatives to Composer, Kubernetes?

Meteor

A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets.

Bower

Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.

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.

Elm

Writing HTML apps is super easy with elm-lang/html. Not only does it render extremely fast, it also quietly guides you towards well-architected code.

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.

Julia

Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library.

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.

Racket

It is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language based on the Scheme dialect of Lisp. It is designed to be a platform for programming language design and implementation. It is also used for scripting, computer science education, and research.

Related Comparisons

Composer vs Kubernetes: What are the differences?

Architecture: Composer is a dependency management tool for PHP that allows developers to manage and install third-party libraries and packages in their projects. It works at the application level and is primarily used during the development phase. On the other hand, Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that manages and scales containerized applications across a cluster of servers. It focuses on managing the deployment and runtime of applications in production environments.
Level of Abstraction: Composer operates at a higher level of abstraction as it deals with the dependencies and libraries required by an application, ensuring that the correct versions are installed and compatible with each other. Kubernetes, on the other hand, works at a lower level of abstraction by managing containers and their resources, providing functionalities like load balancing, scaling, and automatic failure recovery.
Scope of Management: Composer primarily focuses on managing applications and their dependencies within a single development environment. It resolves and installs dependencies based on the project configuration file. In contrast, Kubernetes is designed for managing complex containerized applications across multiple environments, including test and production environments. It supports the deployment and management of multiple services and containers that collectively form an application.
Scaling and Load Balancing: Kubernetes provides built-in support for scaling applications horizontally and vertically by adjusting the number of replicas and resources assigned to each container. It also offers built-in load balancing capabilities to distribute traffic across multiple instances of an application. Composer, on the other hand, does not provide native scaling or load balancing features as it is primarily used for local development and dependency management.
Monitoring and Logging: Kubernetes offers extensive monitoring and logging capabilities through integration with various tools and technologies like Prometheus and Elasticsearch. It provides metrics and logs for monitoring and troubleshooting applications running in the cluster. Composer, being a dependency management tool, does not have built-in monitoring and logging features as it focuses on managing code dependencies rather than application runtime.
Deployment Flexibility: Kubernetes supports a wide range of deployment strategies, including rolling updates, blue-green deployments, and canary releases. It allows for seamless deployment of new versions and updates without interrupting the running application. Composer, being a development tool, does not provide deployment strategies as it is primarily concerned with resolving dependencies and managing libraries.

Composer vs Kubernetes

Overview