Habitat vs Kubernetes

Overview

Kubernetes

Stacks61.2K

Followers52.8K

Votes685

Habitat

Stacks34

Followers60

Votes5

GitHub Stars2.7K

Forks319

Habitat vs Kubernetes: What are the differences?

Deployment Model: Habitat focuses on application-centric automation, where applications are packaged with all their dependencies, runtime, and configuration. In contrast, Kubernetes is a container orchestrator that mainly deals with automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Habitat provides a holistic approach to deployment by bundling everything the application needs into a package, making it self-sufficient.
Networking: In Habitat, the focus is on service discovery and communication within the application's habitat, ensuring applications can find each other easily and communicate. Kubernetes, on the other hand, emphasizes network policies, services, and ingresses to manage communication between various microservices and external clients. While both address networking, Habitat's approach is more internal to the application, whereas Kubernetes focuses on networking at a broader cluster level.
Configuration Management: Habitat incorporates configuration management as a core component, allowing applications to be easily versioned and managed with configuration data. Kubernetes, on the other hand, relies on tools like ConfigMaps and Secrets to manage configuration externally from the application. Habitat's approach embeds configuration within the application package itself, promoting a more cohesive management strategy.
Service Discovery: Habitat provides built-in service discovery mechanisms that allow applications to dynamically find and communicate with each other within the habitat environment. In Kubernetes, service discovery is achieved through Services and DNS management, enabling applications to discover and communicate with each other across the cluster. Habitat's approach is more geared towards encapsulating the service discovery logic within the application itself.
Health Checks: Habitat includes health checks as an inherent part of the application lifecycle, enabling applications to self-monitor and maintain their health status. Kubernetes uses probes to perform health checks on containers and determine their status. While both ensure applications are healthy, Habitat's approach integrates health checks closely with the application, enhancing self-sufficiency and autonomy.
Scalability: Kubernetes excels in horizontal scaling, allowing operators to scale applications by adding or removing pods dynamically. Habitat, on the other hand, focuses more on the packaging and deployment aspects of applications rather than the scaling mechanisms. While Habitat does provide tools for managing the lifecycle of applications, Kubernetes offers more robust scaling capabilities for containerized workloads.

In Summary, Habitat and Kubernetes differ in their deployment model, networking approach, configuration management, service discovery mechanisms, health check integration, and scalability strategies.

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Advice on Kubernetes, Habitat

Simon

Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH

Apr 27, 2020

Decidedon

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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	Habitat
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.	Habitat is a new approach to automation that focuses on the application instead of the infrastructure it runs on. With Habitat, the apps you build, deploy, and manage behave consistently in any runtime — metal, VMs, containers, and PaaS. You'll spend less time on the environment and more time building features.
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 -	GitHub Stars 2.7K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 319
Stacks 61.2K	Stacks 34
Followers 52.8K	Followers 60
Votes 685	Votes 5
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 to use 1 Supervisor is great concept 1 Cross platform builds 1 Lightweight
Integrations
Vagrant Docker Rackspace Cloud Servers Microsoft Azure Google Compute Engine Ansible Google Kubernetes Engine	Terraform Microsoft Azure Chef rkt Nomad Google App Engine Docker Mesosphere Google Compute Engine VMware vSphere

What are some alternatives to Kubernetes, Habitat?

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.

AWS CloudFormation

You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order in which AWS services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work.

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.

Packer

Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.

Scalr

Scalr is a remote state & operations backend for Terraform with access controls, policy as code, and many quality of life features.

Pulumi

Pulumi is a cloud development platform that makes creating cloud programs easy and productive. Skip the YAML and just write code. Pulumi is multi-language, multi-cloud and fully extensible in both its engine and ecosystem of packages.

Related Comparisons

Habitat vs Kubernetes: What are the differences?

Deployment Model: Habitat focuses on application-centric automation, where applications are packaged with all their dependencies, runtime, and configuration. In contrast, Kubernetes is a container orchestrator that mainly deals with automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Habitat provides a holistic approach to deployment by bundling everything the application needs into a package, making it self-sufficient.
Networking: In Habitat, the focus is on service discovery and communication within the application's habitat, ensuring applications can find each other easily and communicate. Kubernetes, on the other hand, emphasizes network policies, services, and ingresses to manage communication between various microservices and external clients. While both address networking, Habitat's approach is more internal to the application, whereas Kubernetes focuses on networking at a broader cluster level.
Configuration Management: Habitat incorporates configuration management as a core component, allowing applications to be easily versioned and managed with configuration data. Kubernetes, on the other hand, relies on tools like ConfigMaps and Secrets to manage configuration externally from the application. Habitat's approach embeds configuration within the application package itself, promoting a more cohesive management strategy.
Service Discovery: Habitat provides built-in service discovery mechanisms that allow applications to dynamically find and communicate with each other within the habitat environment. In Kubernetes, service discovery is achieved through Services and DNS management, enabling applications to discover and communicate with each other across the cluster. Habitat's approach is more geared towards encapsulating the service discovery logic within the application itself.
Health Checks: Habitat includes health checks as an inherent part of the application lifecycle, enabling applications to self-monitor and maintain their health status. Kubernetes uses probes to perform health checks on containers and determine their status. While both ensure applications are healthy, Habitat's approach integrates health checks closely with the application, enhancing self-sufficiency and autonomy.
Scalability: Kubernetes excels in horizontal scaling, allowing operators to scale applications by adding or removing pods dynamically. Habitat, on the other hand, focuses more on the packaging and deployment aspects of applications rather than the scaling mechanisms. While Habitat does provide tools for managing the lifecycle of applications, Kubernetes offers more robust scaling capabilities for containerized workloads.

In Summary, Habitat and Kubernetes differ in their deployment model, networking approach, configuration management, service discovery mechanisms, health check integration, and scalability strategies.

Habitat vs Kubernetes

Overview