What role does samba play when deploying a domain controller?

Question

linux

The Internet is full of articles telling how to raise a domain controller in conjunction with OpenLDAP and Samba.
I do not quite understand why samba is needed there. and can you do without it?

Answer 1

Samba is the domain controller. So if you want to implement a domain controller on unixes, then you can't do without samba :-)
OpenLDAP is a credential store for a domain. Account database, in other words.
In my opinion, you can do without OpenLDAP when implementing a domain, but not without samba.