Kubernetes and Swarm orchestration

While there are many variations and incantations in the orchestration space, the market boils down to very different players: Kubernetes and Swarm. And no, Swarm is not dead. 

Kubernetes has rapidly evolved as a modular and highly configurable third-party orchestration platform supported and used by 12-factor, cloud native developers. From an engineering point of view, it is a very interesting platform with many degrees of freedom and points of extensibility. For hardcore 12-factor folks (also known as the cool kids) who are usually delivering highly complex systems at massive scale, using Kubernetes is a no-brainer. However, if you are not Google or eBay, Kubernetes might be a little much for you, especially as you get started.

Swarm, Docker's orchestration tool, started off as an add-in, but in version 1.12 was added to the Docker Engine. As such, there is nothing to install; rather, you activate it using the docker swarm init and docker swarm join commands to create a TLS encrypted cluster with overlay networking ready to go! So, it's sort of the easy button for orchestration because there's nothing extra to install, and it is both secure and ready to use out of the box. Swarm is included in Docker Engine-Community and Docker Enterprise's UCP piggybacks directly off of Swarm.