Alternatives to Kubernetes logo

Alternatives to Kubernetes

Docker Swarm, Nomad, OpenStack, Rancher, and Docker Compose are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Kubernetes.
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What is Kubernetes and what are its top alternatives?

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.
Kubernetes is a tool in the Container Tools category of a tech stack.
Kubernetes is an open source tool with GitHub stars and GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Kubernetes's open source repository on GitHub

Top Alternatives to Kubernetes

  • Docker Swarm
    Docker Swarm

    Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself. ...

  • Nomad
    Nomad

    Nomad is a cluster manager, designed for both long lived services and short lived batch processing workloads. Developers use a declarative job specification to submit work, and Nomad ensures constraints are satisfied and resource utilization is optimized by efficient task packing. Nomad supports all major operating systems and virtualized, containerized, or standalone applications. ...

  • OpenStack
    OpenStack

    OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface. ...

  • Rancher
    Rancher

    Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform. ...

  • Docker Compose
    Docker Compose

    With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running. ...

  • DC/OS
    DC/OS

    Unlike traditional operating systems, DC/OS spans multiple machines within a network, aggregating their resources to maximize utilization by distributed applications. ...

  • Apache Mesos
    Apache Mesos

    Apache Mesos is a cluster manager that simplifies the complexity of running applications on a shared pool of servers. ...

  • Docker
    Docker

    The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere ...

Kubernetes alternatives & related posts

Docker Swarm logo

Docker Swarm

779
974
282
Native clustering for Docker. Turn a pool of Docker hosts into a single, virtual host.
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PROS OF DOCKER SWARM
  • 55
    Docker friendly
  • 46
    Easy to setup
  • 40
    Standard Docker API
  • 38
    Easy to use
  • 23
    Native
  • 22
    Free
  • 13
    Clustering made easy
  • 12
    Simple usage
  • 11
    Integral part of docker
  • 6
    Cross Platform
  • 5
    Labels and annotations
  • 5
    Performance
  • 3
    Easy Networking
  • 3
    Shallow learning curve
CONS OF DOCKER SWARM
  • 9
    Low adoption

related Docker Swarm posts

Yshay Yaacobi

Our first experience with .NET core was when we developed our OSS feature management platform - Tweek (https://github.com/soluto/tweek). We wanted to create a solution that is able to run anywhere (super important for OSS), has excellent performance characteristics and can fit in a multi-container architecture. We decided to implement our rule engine processor in F# , our main service was implemented in C# and other components were built using JavaScript / TypeScript and Go.

Visual Studio Code worked really well for us as well, it worked well with all our polyglot services and the .Net core integration had great cross-platform developer experience (to be fair, F# was a bit trickier) - actually, each of our team members used a different OS (Ubuntu, macos, windows). Our production deployment ran for a time on Docker Swarm until we've decided to adopt Kubernetes with almost seamless migration process.

After our positive experience of running .Net core workloads in containers and developing Tweek's .Net services on non-windows machines, C# had gained back some of its popularity (originally lost to Node.js), and other teams have been using it for developing microservices, k8s sidecars (like https://github.com/Soluto/airbag), cli tools, serverless functions and other projects...

See more
Simon Reymann
Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 8.9M views

Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

  • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
  • Respectively Git as revision control system
  • SourceTree as Git GUI
  • Visual Studio Code as IDE
  • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
  • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
  • SonarQube as quality gate
  • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
  • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
  • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
  • Heroku for deploying in test environments
  • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
  • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
  • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
  • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
  • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

  • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
  • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
  • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
  • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
  • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
  • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
See more
Nomad logo

Nomad

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A cluster manager and scheduler
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PROS OF NOMAD
  • 7
    Built in Consul integration
  • 6
    Easy setup
  • 4
    Bult-in Vault integration
  • 3
    Built-in federation support
  • 2
    Self-healing
  • 2
    Autoscaling support
  • 1
    Bult-in Vault inegration
  • 1
    Stable
  • 1
    Simple
  • 1
    Nice ACL
  • 1
    Managable by terraform
  • 1
    Open source
  • 1
    Multiple workload support
  • 1
    Flexible
CONS OF NOMAD
  • 3
    Easy to start with
  • 1
    HCL language for configuration, an unpopular DSL
  • 1
    Small comunity

related Nomad posts

Robert Zuber

Our backend consists of two major pools of machines. One pool hosts the systems that run our site, manage jobs, and send notifications. These services are deployed within Docker containers orchestrated in Kubernetes. Due to Kubernetes’ ecosystem and toolchain, it was an obvious choice for our fairly statically-defined processes: the rate of change of job types or how many we may need in our internal stack is relatively low.

The other pool of machines is for running our users’ jobs. Because we cannot dynamically predict demand, what types of jobs our users need to have run, nor the resources required for each of those jobs, we found that Nomad excelled over Kubernetes in this area.

We’re also using Helm to make it easier to deploy new services into Kubernetes. We create a chart (i.e. package) for each service. This lets us easily roll back new software and gives us an audit trail of what was installed or upgraded.

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OpenStack logo

OpenStack

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Open source software for building private and public clouds
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PROS OF OPENSTACK
  • 56
    Private cloud
  • 38
    Avoid vendor lock-in
  • 22
    Flexible in use
  • 6
    Industry leader
  • 4
    Supported by many companies in top500
  • 4
    Robust architecture
CONS OF OPENSTACK
    Be the first to leave a con

    related OpenStack posts

    Rancher logo

    Rancher

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    Open Source Platform for Running a Private Container Service
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    PROS OF RANCHER
    • 103
      Easy to use
    • 79
      Open source and totally free
    • 63
      Multi-host docker-compose support
    • 58
      Load balancing and health check included
    • 58
      Simple
    • 44
      Rolling upgrades, green/blue upgrades feature
    • 42
      Dns and service discovery out-of-the-box
    • 37
      Only requires docker
    • 34
      Multitenant and permission management
    • 29
      Easy to use and feature rich
    • 11
      Cross cloud compatible
    • 11
      Does everything needed for a docker infrastructure
    • 8
      Simple and powerful
    • 8
      Next-gen platform
    • 7
      Very Docker-friendly
    • 6
      Support Kubernetes and Swarm
    • 6
      Application catalogs with stack templates (wizards)
    • 6
      Supports Apache Mesos, Docker Swarm, and Kubernetes
    • 6
      Rolling and blue/green upgrades deployments
    • 6
      High Availability service: keeps your app up 24/7
    • 5
      Easy to use service catalog
    • 4
      Very intuitive UI
    • 4
      IaaS-vendor independent, supports hybrid/multi-cloud
    • 4
      Awesome support
    • 3
      Scalable
    • 2
      Requires less infrastructure requirements
    CONS OF RANCHER
    • 10
      Hosting Rancher can be complicated

    related Rancher posts

    Docker Compose logo

    Docker Compose

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    Define and run multi-container applications with Docker
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    PROS OF DOCKER COMPOSE
    • 123
      Multi-container descriptor
    • 110
      Fast development environment setup
    • 79
      Easy linking of containers
    • 68
      Simple yaml configuration
    • 60
      Easy setup
    • 16
      Yml or yaml format
    • 12
      Use Standard Docker API
    • 8
      Open source
    • 5
      Go from template to application in minutes
    • 5
      Can choose Discovery Backend
    • 4
      Scalable
    • 4
      Easy configuration
    • 4
      Kubernetes integration
    • 3
      Quick and easy
    CONS OF DOCKER COMPOSE
    • 9
      Tied to single machine
    • 5
      Still very volatile, changing syntax often

    related Docker Compose posts

    Simon Reymann
    Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 8.9M views

    Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

    • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
    • Respectively Git as revision control system
    • SourceTree as Git GUI
    • Visual Studio Code as IDE
    • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
    • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
    • SonarQube as quality gate
    • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
    • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
    • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
    • Heroku for deploying in test environments
    • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
    • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
    • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
    • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
    • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

    The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

    • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
    • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
    • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
    • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
    • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
    • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
    See more

    Recently I have been working on an open source stack to help people consolidate their personal health data in a single database so that AI and analytics apps can be run against it to find personalized treatments. We chose to go with a #containerized approach leveraging Docker #containers with a local development environment setup with Docker Compose and nginx for container routing. For the production environment we chose to pull code from GitHub and build/push images using Jenkins and using Kubernetes to deploy to Amazon EC2.

    We also implemented a dashboard app to handle user authentication/authorization, as well as a custom SSO server that runs on Heroku which allows experts to easily visit more than one instance without having to login repeatedly. The #Backend was implemented using my favorite #Stack which consists of FeathersJS on top of Node.js and ExpressJS with PostgreSQL as the main database. The #Frontend was implemented using React, Redux.js, Semantic UI React and the FeathersJS client. Though testing was light on this project, we chose to use AVA as well as ESLint to keep the codebase clean and consistent.

    See more
    DC/OS logo

    DC/OS

    109
    180
    12
    The Datacenter Operating System. The easiest way to run microservices, big data, and containers in production.
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    PROS OF DC/OS
    • 5
      Easy to setup a HA cluster
    • 3
      Open source
    • 2
      Has templates to install via AWS and Azure
    • 1
      Easy Setup
    • 1
      Easy to get services running and operate them
    CONS OF DC/OS
      Be the first to leave a con

      related DC/OS posts

      Apache Mesos logo

      Apache Mesos

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      419
      31
      Develop and run resource-efficient distributed systems
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      PROS OF APACHE MESOS
      • 21
        Easy scaling
      • 6
        Web UI
      • 2
        Fault-Tolerant
      • 1
        Elastic Distributed System
      • 1
        High-Available
      CONS OF APACHE MESOS
      • 1
        Not for long term
      • 1
        Depends on Zookeeper

      related Apache Mesos posts

      Docker containers on Mesos run their microservices with consistent configurations at scale, along with Aurora for long-running services and cron jobs.

      See more
      Docker logo

      Docker

      184.8K
      136K
      3.9K
      Enterprise Container Platform for High-Velocity Innovation.
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      PROS OF DOCKER
      • 823
        Rapid integration and build up
      • 691
        Isolation
      • 521
        Open source
      • 505
        Testa­bil­i­ty and re­pro­ducibil­i­ty
      • 460
        Lightweight
      • 218
        Standardization
      • 185
        Scalable
      • 106
        Upgrading / down­grad­ing / ap­pli­ca­tion versions
      • 88
        Security
      • 85
        Private paas environments
      • 34
        Portability
      • 26
        Limit resource usage
      • 17
        Game changer
      • 16
        I love the way docker has changed virtualization
      • 14
        Fast
      • 12
        Concurrency
      • 8
        Docker's Compose tools
      • 6
        Easy setup
      • 6
        Fast and Portable
      • 5
        Because its fun
      • 4
        Makes shipping to production very simple
      • 3
        Highly useful
      • 3
        It's dope
      • 2
        Very easy to setup integrate and build
      • 2
        HIgh Throughput
      • 2
        Package the environment with the application
      • 2
        Does a nice job hogging memory
      • 2
        Open source and highly configurable
      • 2
        Simplicity, isolation, resource effective
      • 2
        MacOS support FAKE
      • 2
        Its cool
      • 2
        Docker hub for the FTW
      • 2
        Super
      • 0
        Asdfd
      CONS OF DOCKER
      • 8
        New versions == broken features
      • 6
        Unreliable networking
      • 6
        Documentation not always in sync
      • 4
        Moves quickly
      • 3
        Not Secure

      related Docker posts

      Simon Reymann
      Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 8.9M views

      Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

      • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
      • Respectively Git as revision control system
      • SourceTree as Git GUI
      • Visual Studio Code as IDE
      • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
      • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
      • SonarQube as quality gate
      • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
      • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
      • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
      • Heroku for deploying in test environments
      • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
      • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
      • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
      • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
      • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

      The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

      • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
      • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
      • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
      • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
      • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
      • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
      See more
      Tymoteusz Paul
      Devops guy at X20X Development LTD · | 23 upvotes · 8M views

      Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

      It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

      I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

      We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

      If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

      The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

      Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.

      See more