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  5. Microcontainers vs OpenStack

Microcontainers vs OpenStack

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

OpenStack
OpenStack
Stacks790
Followers1.2K
Votes138
Microcontainers
Microcontainers
Stacks4
Followers60
Votes0
GitHub Stars1.6K
Forks138

Microcontainers vs OpenStack: What are the differences?

What is Microcontainers? Tiny, Portable Docker Containers. A Microcontainer contains only the OS libraries and language dependencies required to run an application and the application itself. Nothing more. Rather than starting with everything but the kitchen sink, start with the bare minimum and add dependencies on an as needed basis.

What is OpenStack? Open source software for building private and public clouds. 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.

Microcontainers and OpenStack are primarily classified as "Container" and "Open Source Cloud" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Microcontainers are:

  • Size — MicroContainers are small. As shown above, without changing any code the image is 22 times smaller than a typical image.
  • Fast/Easy Distribution — Because the size is so much smaller, it’s much quicker to download the image from a Docker registry (eg: Docker Hub) and therefore it can be distributed to different machines much quicker.
  • Improved Security — Less code/less programs in the container means less attack surface. And, the base OS can be more secure (more below).

On the other hand, OpenStack provides the following key features:

  • Compute
  • Storage
  • Networking

Microcontainers is an open source tool with 1.56K GitHub stars and 137 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Microcontainers's open source repository on GitHub.

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Detailed Comparison

OpenStack
OpenStack
Microcontainers
Microcontainers

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.

A Microcontainer contains only the OS libraries and language dependencies required to run an application and the application itself. Nothing more. Rather than starting with everything but the kitchen sink, start with the bare minimum and add dependencies on an as needed basis.

Compute;Storage;Networking;Dashboard;Shared Services
Size — MicroContainers are small. As shown above, without changing any code the image is 22 times smaller than a typical image.;Fast/Easy Distribution — Because the size is so much smaller, it’s much quicker to download the image from a Docker registry (eg: Docker Hub) and therefore it can be distributed to different machines much quicker.;Improved Security — Less code/less programs in the container means less attack surface. And, the base OS can be more secure (more below).
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
1.6K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
138
Stacks
790
Stacks
4
Followers
1.2K
Followers
60
Votes
138
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 60
    Private cloud
  • 39
    Avoid vendor lock-in
  • 23
    Flexible in use
  • 7
    Industry leader
  • 5
    Robust architecture
No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available
Docker
Docker

What are some alternatives to OpenStack, Microcontainers?

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.

Apache CloudStack

Apache CloudStack

CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform.

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.

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