Kubernetes vs Docker: What is the difference?

Hi @fullstacknewb,

Well the easy explanation is - Kubernetes is a container orchestration system for Docker containers that is more extensive than Docker Swarm and is meant to coordinate clusters of nodes at scale in production in an efficient manner.

Basically, Docker is a containerization platform, and Kubernetes is a container orchestrator for container platforms like Docker.

As Kubernetes is a container orchestrator, it needs a container runtime in order to orchestrate. Kubernetes is most commonly used with Docker, but it can also be used with any container runtime. RunC, cri-o, containerd are other container runtimes that you can deploy with Kubernetes. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) maintains a listing of endorsed container runtimes on their ecosystem landscape page and Kubernetes documentation provides specific instructions for getting set up using ContainerD and CRI-O.

Regards, KDSys

A oversimplified way of thinking about it is:

Docker is a technology to containerize and run an application.

Kubernetes is a technology to manage many instances of one or more containerized applications and their relevant components (storage, Load Balancers, networkpolicies, etc).