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  5. Rancher Fleet vs Skaffold

Rancher Fleet vs Skaffold

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Skaffold
Skaffold
Stacks86
Followers186
Votes0
Rancher Fleet
Rancher Fleet
Stacks13
Followers72
Votes4
GitHub Stars1.6K
Forks248

Rancher Fleet vs Skaffold: What are the differences?

Rancher Fleet vs Skaffold

Rancher Fleet and Skaffold are two popular tools used in Kubernetes for managing and deploying applications. While they both serve similar purposes, there are key differences between the two. Here are the six main differences between Rancher Fleet and Skaffold:

  1. Architecture: Rancher Fleet is designed as a GitOps-style Kubernetes management tool that uses Git repositories as a source of truth for defining and managing application configurations. On the other hand, Skaffold is a command-line tool that focuses on streamlining the local development workflow and providing easy application deployment.

  2. Scope: Rancher Fleet is more oriented towards managing and deploying applications across multiple Kubernetes clusters, making it suitable for large-scale deployments and multi-cluster environments. Skaffold, on the other hand, is primarily focused on providing a seamless local development experience and is well-suited for single-cluster deployments.

  3. Deployment Strategies: Rancher Fleet supports various deployment strategies, including canary deployments, blue-green deployments, and automated rollbacks. Skaffold, on the other hand, primarily focuses on a traditional development workflow and does not provide built-in support for advanced deployment strategies.

  4. Integration with CI/CD: Rancher Fleet is designed to integrate well with CI/CD pipelines, allowing teams to automate their application deployment processes and workflows. Skaffold, while it can be integrated with CI/CD systems, is primarily targeted towards streamlining the local development workflow rather than being a full-fledged deployment automation tool.

  5. User Interface: Rancher Fleet provides a graphical user interface (GUI) where users can manage and monitor their application deployments, view resource utilization, and perform various cluster management tasks. Skaffold, on the other hand, is a command-line tool and does not have a graphical user interface.

  6. Community and Support: Rancher Fleet is backed by Rancher Labs, a well-known company in the Kubernetes ecosystem, and has a significant community and commercial support. Skaffold is an open-source project led by Google, with a growing community and active development, but its commercial support options may be limited.

In summary, Rancher Fleet is a GitOps-oriented tool with support for multi-cluster management and advanced deployment strategies, while Skaffold focuses on streamlining the local development workflow in a single-cluster environment. The choice between the two depends on the specific needs and requirements of the project or organization.

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Detailed Comparison

Skaffold
Skaffold
Rancher Fleet
Rancher Fleet

Skaffold is a command line tool that facilitates continuous development for Kubernetes applications. You can iterate on your application source code locally then deploy to local or remote Kubernetes clusters. Skaffold handles the workflow for building, pushing and deploying your application. It can also be used in an automated context such as a CI/CD pipeline to leverage the same workflow and tooling when moving applications to production.

It is a Kubernetes cluster fleet controller specifically designed to address the challenges of running thousands to millions of clusters across the world. While it's designed for massive scale the concepts still apply for even small deployments of less than 10 clusters. It is lightweight enough to run on the smallest of deployments too and even has merit in a single node cluster managing only itself.

No server-side component. No overhead to your cluster.;Detect changes in your source code and automatically build/push/deploy.;Image tag management. Stop worrying about updating the image tags in Kubernetes manifests to push out changes during development.;Supports existing tooling and workflows. Build and deploy APIs make each implementation composable to support many different workflows.;Support for multiple application components. Build and deploy only the pieces of your stack that have changed.;Deploy regularly when saving files or run one off deployments using the same configuration
Kubernetes cluster fleet controller; Designed for massive scale; Lightweight; Ensure that deployments are consistents across clusters
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
1.6K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
248
Stacks
86
Stacks
13
Followers
186
Followers
72
Votes
0
Votes
4
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet
Pros
  • 2
    UI Integration
  • 1
    Scalability
  • 1
    Enterprise support
Integrations
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Google Kubernetes Engine
Google Kubernetes Engine
Docker
Docker
Kubernetes
Kubernetes

What are some alternatives to Skaffold, Rancher Fleet?

Kubernetes

Kubernetes

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.

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.

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.

Tutum

Tutum

Tutum lets developers easily manage and run lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. AWS-like control, Heroku-like ease. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale in Tutum.

Portainer

Portainer

It is a universal container management tool. It works with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm and Azure ACI. It allows you to manage containers without needing to know platform-specific code.

Codefresh

Codefresh

Automate and parallelize testing. Codefresh allows teams to spin up on-demand compositions to run unit and integration tests as part of the continuous integration process. Jenkins integration allows more complex pipelines.

CAST.AI

CAST.AI

It is an AI-driven cloud optimization platform for Kubernetes. Instantly cut your cloud bill, prevent downtime, and 10X the power of DevOps.

k3s

k3s

Certified Kubernetes distribution designed for production workloads in unattended, resource-constrained, remote locations or inside IoT appliances. Supports something as small as a Raspberry Pi or as large as an AWS a1.4xlarge 32GiB server.

Flocker

Flocker

Flocker is a data volume manager and multi-host Docker cluster management tool. With it you can control your data using the same tools you use for your stateless applications. This means that you can run your databases, queues and key-value stores in Docker and move them around as easily as the rest of your app.

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