Sorry I'm really confused and rather new to the devops world, aside from pushing an app to a single VPS. What problem does Kubernetes solve exactly? Is it to tie a single application spread among multiple servers?
When you have multiple containers, it is imperative that they are managed as a group, with clearly defined dependencies. This is why Docker requires an orchestration tool. And when the number of your production nodes is greater than one, Docker on its own becomes inadequate for that.
Can't the above be orchestrated via docker-compose?
(I've been using docker with docker-compose for my side projects but not been using it excessively in customer facing production)
For anything more than that, native Docker tooling is inadequate.
If you have multiple devs...how does docker-compose fall short? (I'm asking because I wanted to suggest using docker for my team and wanted to know it's short comings before I suggested it).
From my understanding: you can use compose to orchestrate databases, cache, app all on one machine quite easily (and pass environment variables, get them linked etc.)
- Secret distribution
- Managing persistent volumes
- Monitoring containers for failure, restarting according to policy
- Service discovery and DNS integration
- Integration with load balancers, setting up routes, etc.
- Managing affinity / non-affinity for containers
- Sharing resources on a cluster via namespaces
This alone warrants an orchestration solution, even on a single machine.