Jump right into Kubernetes development with career-focused lessons and hands-on practice.

DevOps for Developers

Kubernetes is a powerful container management tool that's taking the world by storm. This detailed course will help you master it.

In this course, you'll start with the fundamentals of Kubernetes and what the main components of a cluster look like. You'll then learn how to use those components to build, test, deploy, and upgrade applications, as well as how to achieve state persistence once your application is deployed. You'll also learn how to secure your deployments and manage resources, which are crucial DevOps skills.

By the time you're done, you'll have a firm grasp on what Kubernetes is, as well as the skills to deploy your own clusters and applications with confidence.

A Practical Guide to Kubernetes

# Similarities

Docker has RBAC. Just like Kubernetes, it is organized around subjects, roles, and resource collections. In many aspects, both provide a very similar set of features. Should we quickly declare it a tie?

# Differences
There is one crucial difference between Kubernetes RBAC and the one provided by Docker. The latter is not free. We need to purchase Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) to secure our cluster beyond “only those with the certificate can access it.” If you do have Docker EE, you already made up your mind, and the discussion about whether to use one or the other is over.

Docker EE is great, and soon it will work not only with Swarm but also with Kubernetes. If you’ve bought it, there’s not much reason to switch to something else. However, this comparison focuses on what open source core versions can offer. It ignores third-party and enterprise additions.

If we stick with an “only what’s in the box” comparison, Kubernetes is a clear winner. It has RBAC, and Docker Swarm doesn’t. The problem is not that Swarm doesn’t have RBAC but that it doesn’t have any user-based authentication baked in.

This is a very short comparison. If you don’t want to purchase enterprise products and need an authorization and authentication mechanism, Kubernetes is the only option. Just as with namespaces, Kubernetes shows its strength by the sheer number of features that do not exist in Swarm.




Compare Kubernetes RBAC with the Docker Swarm RBAC.


Comparison with Docker Swarm

Compare Kubernetes RBAC with the Docker Swarm RBAC.