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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Build Automation
  4. Infrastructure Build Tools
  5. LinuxKit vs Packer

LinuxKit vs Packer

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Packer
Packer
Stacks573
Followers566
Votes41
LinuxKit
LinuxKit
Stacks13
Followers37
Votes1
GitHub Stars8.5K
Forks1.0K

LinuxKit vs Packer: What are the differences?

What is LinuxKit? A toolkit for building secure, portable and lean operating systems for containers. LinuxKit, a toolkit for building custom minimal, immutable Linux distributions. Designed for building and running clustered applications, including but not limited to container orchestration such as Docker or Kubernetes.

What is Packer? Create identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.

LinuxKit and Packer are primarily classified as "Container" and "Infrastructure Build" tools respectively.

LinuxKit and Packer are both open source tools. It seems that Packer with 9.1K GitHub stars and 2.47K forks on GitHub has more adoption than LinuxKit with 5.65K GitHub stars and 687 GitHub forks.

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Detailed Comparison

Packer
Packer
LinuxKit
LinuxKit

Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.

LinuxKit, a toolkit for building custom minimal, immutable Linux distributions. Designed for building and running clustered applications, including but not limited to container orchestration such as Docker or Kubernetes.

Super fast infrastructure deployment. Packer images allow you to launch completely provisioned and configured machines in seconds, rather than several minutes or hours.;Multi-provider portability. Because Packer creates identical images for multiple platforms, you can run production in AWS, staging/QA in a private cloud like OpenStack, and development in desktop virtualization solutions such as VMware or VirtualBox.;Improved stability. Packer installs and configures all the software for a machine at the time the image is built. If there are bugs in these scripts, they'll be caught early, rather than several minutes after a machine is launched.;Greater testability. After a machine image is built, that machine image can be quickly launched and smoke tested to verify that things appear to be working. If they are, you can be confident that any other machines launched from that image will function properly.
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
8.5K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
1.0K
Stacks
573
Stacks
13
Followers
566
Followers
37
Votes
41
Votes
1
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 27
    Cross platform builds
  • 8
    Vm creation automation
  • 4
    Bake in security
  • 1
    Good documentation
  • 1
    Easy to use
Pros
  • 1
    Open Source
Integrations
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
Docker
Docker
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
OpenStack
OpenStack
VirtualBox
VirtualBox
Docker
Docker
Kubernetes
Kubernetes

What are some alternatives to Packer, LinuxKit?

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.

AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation

You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order in which AWS services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work.

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.

Scalr

Scalr

Scalr is a remote state & operations backend for Terraform with access controls, policy as code, and many quality of life features.

Pulumi

Pulumi

Pulumi is a cloud development platform that makes creating cloud programs easy and productive. Skip the YAML and just write code. Pulumi is multi-language, multi-cloud and fully extensible in both its engine and ecosystem of packages.

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