I am new to cluster container management, and this question is the basis for all the freshers over here.
I read some documentation, but still, my understanding is not too clear, so any leads.. helping to understand?
I think this 4-5 set will help me better.
Presuming that your goal here is to run a set of containers over a number of different Raspberry Pi based nodes:
Minikube isn't really appropriate. This starts a single virtual machine on a Windows, MacOS or Linux and installs a Kubernetes cluster into it. It's generally used by developers to quickly start-up a cluster on their laptops or desktops for development and testing purposes.
Docker Compose is a system for managing sets of related containers. So for example if you had a web server and database that you wanted to manage together you could put them in a single Docker Compose file.
Docker Swarm is a system for managing sets of containers across multiple hosts. It's essentially an alternative to Kubernetes. It has fewer features than Kubernetes, but it is much simpler to set up.
If you want a really simple multi-node Container cluster, I'd say that Docker swarm is a reasonable choice. If you explicitly want to experiment with Kubernetes, I'd say that kubeadm is a good option here. Kubernetes in general has higher resource requirements than Docker Swarm, so it could be somewhat less suited to it, although I know people have successfully run Kubernetes clusters on Raspberry Pis.
Docker Compose A utility to to start multiple docker containers on a single host using a single docker-compose up. This makes it easier to start multiple containers at once, rather than having do mutliple docker run commands.
Docker swarm A native container orchestrator for Docker. Docker swarm allows you to create a cluster of docker containers running on multiple machines. It provides features such as replication, scaling, self-healing i.e. starting a new container when one dies ...
Kubernetes Also a container orchestrator. Kubernetes and Docker swarm can be considered as alternatives to one another. They both try to handle managing containers starting in a cluster
Minikube Creating a real kubernetes cluster requires having multiple machines either on premise or on a cloud platform. This is not always convenient if someone is just new to Kubernetes and trying to learn by playing around with Kubernetes. To solve that minikube allows you to start a very basic Kubernetes cluster that consists of a single VM on you machine, which you can use to play around with Kubernetes.
Minikube is not for a production or multi-node cluster. There are many tools that can be used to create a multi-node Kubernetes cluster such as kubeadm
I get the impression you're mostly looking for confirmation and am happy to help with that if I can.
Containers are the future of application deployment. Containers are smallest unit of deployment in docker. There are three components in docker as docker engine to run a single container, docker-compose to run a multi-container application on a single host and docker-swarm to run multi-container application across hosts which also an orchestration tool.
In kubernetes, the smallest unit of deployment is Pod(which is composed of multiple container). Minikube is a single node cluster where you can install it locally and try, test and feel the kubernetes features locally. But, you can't scale this to more than a single machine. Kubernetes is an orchestration tool like Docker Swarm but more prominent than Docker Swarm with respect to features, scaling, resiliency, and security.
You can do the analysis and think about which tool will be fit for your requirements. Each one having their own pros or cons like docker swarm is good and easy to manage small clusters whereas kubernetes is much better for larger once. There is another orchestration tool Mesos which is also popular and used in largest size clusters.
Check this out, Choose your own Adventure but, it's just a general analogy and only to understand because all the three technologies are evolving rapidly.
For Pi, you can use Docker Swarm Mode on one or more Pi's. You can even run ARM emulation for testing on Docker for Windows/Mac before trying to get it all working directly on a Pi. Same goes for Kubernetes, as it's built-in to Docker for Windows/Mac now (no minikube needed).
Alex Ellis has a good blog on Pi and Docker and this post may help too.
