Load Balancing using Docker and Kubernetes: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Still in its early years, containers are increasingly being used in production environments. Containers offer a streamlined approach, easy deployment, and secure method of implementing infrastructure requirements also provide a much-improved alternative to virtual machines. A load balancer is required to distribute traffic across clusters. And now, with multiple container environments becoming widespread, load balancers are becoming a necessity to distribute traffic and reduce server load. Different load balancing algorithms provide a solution to this with varying efficiency. This paper presents a study on the latest methods which are being implemented to perform effective load balancing on containers. Docker Swarm and Kubernetes are the most widely used systems for deploying and managing a cluster of containers in an environment. The paper further demonstrates how Docker Swarm and Kubernetes can be used to minimize load traffic through load balancing techniques. We have introduced load balancing and different algorithms. Also, we have shown the implementations of load balancing algorithms in Docker and Kubernetes and finally compared the results. The paper finally concludes why Kubernetes is often preferred over Docker Swarm for load balancing.