We use AWS Elastic Beanstalk for Docker deployment. Can you comment on how this is different? I see it supports multiple containers per VM - are there other significant distinguishing factors?
Elastic Beanstalk is a VM centric management framework.
Kubernetes and GKE operate at a different level. It is an API for being able to schedule and manage containers instead of VMs. At this point, k8s/GKE doesn't have an idea of an "app" any more than a VM IaaS service has an idea of an app.
Moving from a VM centric view to a container centric view improves a lot of things:
* Easier to create and manage images
* Portability -- images can be moved between providers. Develop on your laptop with docker/k8s and deploy the exact same container image.
* More transparency into compute workload. The hosting VM or cloud can see more of what is going on in the container for monitoring and logging, etc.
* More efficient/higher density -- you can run more on any piece of (virtual?) hardware
* More flexible resource sharing/overcommit -- as you drive density up you can get more nuanced about what workloads take get priority.
Some of this stuff is still in its infancy -- complex resource models aren't fully supported in Docker yet -- but it is where things are going, at least based on Google's experience.
