Table of Contents
As soon as an organization runs more than a handful of containers, it needs a way to coordinate them — scheduling, scaling, networking, and keeping them healthy across many servers. That’s container orchestration, and Kubernetes is its undisputed standard. But people new to containers are often confused about how Kubernetes, Docker, and OpenShift relate: are they rivals? alternatives? This article clears that up, and covers what’s changed in the container world since — including a shift many missed.
Docker vs. Kubernetes: different roles, not rivals
There’s little point pitting Docker “against” Kubernetes — they do different jobs.
Docker builds and runs containers. It packages an application with its libraries, configuration, and dependencies into a portable image (via the Docker CLI, Dockerfile, Docker Compose, and Docker Desktop), and it’s the tool most developers use to create containers locally and in CI pipelines. Containers are lightweight and fast — they can spin up and disappear in seconds, unlike VMs whose lifespans are measured in days — which is what makes them so flexible.
Kubernetes orchestrates containers at scale. If Docker is about creating and running individual containers, Kubernetes is about coordinating hundreds or thousands of them across a cluster — automating deployment, scaling, networking, self-healing, and monitoring, so a whole cluster behaves like one system. In practice, the two are used together: Docker (or similar tooling) builds the images, Kubernetes runs them in production.
The runtime shift you may have missed
Here’s the update that catches many people out. For years, Kubernetes used Docker Engine as its container runtime. That changed: Kubernetes removed the “dockershim” component in version 1.24 (2022) and now runs containers through lightweight, CRI/OCI-compliant runtimes — containerd and CRI-O — directly, instead of Docker.
Crucially, this does not mean “Docker is dead” or that your images stop working. Docker-built images follow the OCI standard and run fine on Kubernetes; Docker remains widely used for building images and local development. What changed is only what runs containers inside the cluster.
Kubernetes: the orchestration standard
Kubernetes began at Google, evolved from its internal Borg cluster-management system, and was open-sourced in 2014 under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which stewards it today. It runs on-premises and in any public cloud, and its core concepts — a control plane automating the cluster, and pods grouping closely related containers that share networking and context — have become the common language of modern infrastructure.
Its dominance is near-total: the vast majority of organizations running containers in production use Kubernetes, and every major cloud offers a managed version (Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, Google GKE) to reduce the operational burden of running the control plane yourself.
Docker Swarm and other orchestrators
Kubernetes isn’t the only orchestrator, but it has clearly won the contest. Docker Swarm — Docker’s own clustering tool — is simpler and quicker to set up, and integrates naturally for teams already using Docker Compose, but it’s far less capable at scale and has become a niche choice for smaller or simpler deployments. Other options include HashiCorp Nomad and cloud-native services like Amazon ECS. For most production environments at scale, though, Kubernetes is the default.
OpenShift: enterprise Kubernetes
OpenShift is best understood not as a competitor to Kubernetes but as a Kubernetes distribution — Red Hat’s enterprise platform built on top of it. It packages Kubernetes with everything needed to run it in production: an operating system, storage and networking integration, CI/CD and developer tooling, monitoring and log aggregation, and its own image-management features (Image Streams). It uses CRI-O as its runtime and takes a notably stricter approach to security — by default, many images from Docker Hub won’t run on OpenShift without adjustment, precisely because of those tighter security policies.
In short, OpenShift trades some of vanilla Kubernetes’ openness for a more complete, governed, enterprise-ready experience — which is why it’s often called “enterprise Kubernetes.”
Orchestrated isn’t the same as protected
One thing orchestration doesn’t do is protect your data. As containers have moved from ephemeral, stateless tasks to running stateful applications with persistent volumes, a Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster now holds real, production-critical data — and neither Kubernetes nor OpenShift backs that up for you.
Storware Backup and Recovery fills that gap. It’s a certified Red Hat OpenShift Operator, protecting both the Kubernetes metadata/resources and the persistent volumes attached to pods — and it protects Kubernetes environments more broadly, application-consistently, with immutable backup targets for ransomware resilience, all under a single universal license.
Learn more about containers:
- Container Technology and its Application in Business
- Virtual Machines and Containers – Similarities and Differences
- Backup for containers – what, when and why?
Ready to protect your data?
Conclusion
Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenShift aren’t three rivals — they’re layers of the same story: Docker builds and packages containers, Kubernetes orchestrates them at scale (now via containerd or CRI-O, not Docker as a runtime), and OpenShift delivers Kubernetes as a governed, enterprise platform. Kubernetes is the clear standard, with Docker Swarm and others filling narrower roles. Whichever you run, remember that orchestration keeps containers running but doesn’t keep their data safe — so pair it with a container-aware, immutable backup strategy.
