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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Container Registry
  4. Container Tools
  5. Gatekeeper vs Kustomize

Gatekeeper vs Kustomize

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Gatekeeper
Gatekeeper
Stacks16
Followers18
Votes0
GitHub Stars4.0K
Forks824
Kustomize
Kustomize
Stacks73
Followers37
Votes0
GitHub Stars11.8K
Forks2.3K

Gatekeeper vs Kustomize: What are the differences?

## Key Differences Between Gatekeeper and Kustomize

<Write Introduction here>

1. **Architecture**: Gatekeeper is built as an admission controller within Kubernetes, enforcing policies during the resource admission phase, while Kustomize is a standalone configuration management tool that specializes in making Kubernetes configuration management easier by enabling the creation of customized Kubernetes manifest files.
2. **Use Case**: Gatekeeper is typically used for policy enforcement and compliance checking, ensuring that resources adhere to specific rules and policies before they are created, updated, or deleted. On the other hand, Kustomize excels in managing configuration customization and allows users to define, modify, and reuse configurations across multiple Kubernetes clusters or environments.
3. **Language of Expression**: Gatekeeper uses Rego, a declarative language based on Datalog, for expressing policies, constraints, and rules, making it highly customizable for defining intricate policies. In contrast, Kustomize relies on a more straightforward approach, using a YAML-based templating language to enable users to manage Kubernetes configuration resources efficiently.
4. **Integration with CI/CD Pipelines**: Gatekeeper integrates well with continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, enabling policy checks during deployment processes to maintain compliance and security standards. Meanwhile, Kustomize can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines to streamline the configuration management process, ensuring consistent configurations across multiple environments.
5. **Community Support**: Gatekeeper is an open-source project maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and has a robust community of contributors and users, providing extensive documentation and support resources. In comparison, Kustomize, while also open-source, has a slightly smaller community but continues to evolve with contributions from the Kubernetes community.

In Summary, Gatekeeper focuses on policy enforcement as an admission controller, using Rego for policy expression, while Kustomize excels in configuration management through customization and integration into CI/CD pipelines.

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Detailed Comparison

Gatekeeper
Gatekeeper
Kustomize
Kustomize

It is a simple to use, open-source, web-based tool to see the OPA Gatekeeper's policies deployed in your cluster and their status.

It introduces a template-free way to customize application configuration that simplifies the use of off-the-shelf applications. Now, built into kubectl as apply -k.

An extensible, parameterized policy library; Native Kubernetes CRDs for instantiating the policy library; Native Kubernetes CRDs for extending the policy library; Audit functionality
Purely declarative approach to configuration customization; Natively built into kubectl; Manage an arbitrary number of distinctly customized Kubernetes configurations; Available as a standalone binary for extension and integration into other services; Every artifact that kustomize uses is plain YAML and can be validated and processed as such
Statistics
GitHub Stars
4.0K
GitHub Stars
11.8K
GitHub Forks
824
GitHub Forks
2.3K
Stacks
16
Stacks
73
Followers
18
Followers
37
Votes
0
Votes
0
Integrations
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Argo
Argo
Kubestack
Kubestack

What are some alternatives to Gatekeeper, Kustomize?

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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