What with container technology still relatively new, practitioners are still debating which orchestration platform is the best to use. Now Docker Inc. is weighing into the debate to push its Swarm platform as the number one choice, and has just published results of a new benchmark test that highlights its advantages over the competing Kubernetes cluster management tool.

Swarm and Kubernetes have emerged as two of the leading container orchestration platforms, which are designed to assist admins in managing container cloud environments. Other orchestration solutions include Amazon’s ECS, Apache Mesos, and OpenShift.

Docker notes in its blog post that Swarm and Kubernetes are the two most popular solutions however, citing a survey which shows market share is split almost evenly between the two, with Amazon ECS coming in third place.

However, Docker says its new benchmark tests show that Swarm really ought to be number one, because it smashes the competition according to its findings.

Docker commissioned the services of Jeff Nickoloff to carry out the testing for it. Those tests compared the performance and response times of Swarm and Kubernetes at different levels of scale.

According to Docker’s results, Swarm delivers a massive, five-times faster performance, and under certain circumstances, such as when the cluster workload hits 100 percent, it was an incredible 98 times faster.

You can see the full test results in Docker’s blog post here.

According to Docker, Swarm delivers much better performance because it’s simpler and more streamlined, as illustrated in the diagram below. Kubernetes, on the other hand, is “overly complex and [needs] teams of cloud engineers to implement and manage it day to day.”

Of course, what with Docker commissioning the tests we can’t say for sure how “neutral” they were. Another caveat is that the scale of the environment used in the tests – 30,000 containers running on 1,000 nodes – is likely to be vastly different from what some organizations are running. Which means Docker still can’t really claim Swarm would work better than Kubernetes in real-world situations.

What is clear is that Docker wants and is doing everything it possibly can to get customers to use its cluster management solution instead of someone else’s. Docker’s main container technology is not under threat from Kubernetes, but the company wants to dominate the entire container ecosystem, which means companies using its products at every level of the stack.

Main image credit: Josch13 via pixabay