Comparison with Docker Swarm

The Similarities

Docker For AWS (D4AWS) quickly became the preferable way to create a Docker Swarm cluster in AWS (and Azure). Similarly, kops is the most commonly used tool to create Kubernetes clusters in AWS.

The result, with both tools, is more or less the same.

• Both create Security Groups, VPCs, Auto-Scaling Groups, Elastic Load Balancers, and everything else a cluster needs.

• In both cases, Auto-Scaling Groups are in charge of creating EC2 instances. Both rely on external storage to keep the state of the cluster (kops in S3 and D4AWS in DynamoDB).

• In both cases, EC2 instances brought to life by Auto-Scaling Groups know how to run system-level services and join the cluster.

If we exclude the fact that one solution runs Docker Swarm and that the other uses Kubernetes, there is no significant functional difference if we observe only the result (the cluster). So, we’ll focus on user experience instead.

The Differences

Both tools can be executed from the command line and that’s where we can spot the first difference.