5 Kubernetes Alternative to check out in 2022

Hardik Shah
4 min readJun 6, 2022

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The buzz around Kubernetes has been growing for years. The hype reached a fever pitch in 2018 and 2019, but that doesn’t mean Kubernetes is the only game in town. In fact, there are a number of compelling alternative systems — including some developed by the big cloud providers themselves — that offer compelling advantages over vanilla Kubernetes.

And while some of these alternatives share many of Kubernetes’ best features (such as its portability and scalability), they also have additional functionality that you might be interested in depending on your environment and requirements.

5 Kubernetes Alternatives to check out in 2022:

1. Docker

The buzz around Kubernetes has been growing for years. The hype reached a fever pitch in 2018 and 2019, but that doesn’t mean Kubernetes is the only game in town. In fact, there are a number of compelling alternative systems — including some developed by the big cloud providers themselves — that offer compelling advantages over vanilla Kubernetes.

And while some of these alternatives share many of Kubernetes’ best features (such as its portability and scalability), they also have additional functionality that you might be interested in depending on your environment and requirements. As we head into 2021, let’s take a look at the different options available to you when it comes to deploying containers in production.

2. AWS EKS

AWS EKS is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) offering that allows you to get started with Kubernetes on AWS. It’s a managed service that makes it easy to deploy, run, and scale containerized applications on AWS.

Like other Kubernetes alternatives for AWS, EKS provides native integration with other AWS services like Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Route 53 and Auto Scaling. You can also use existing tools such as Terraform and CloudFormation if you prefer not to use the provided command line interface (CLI).

3. Azure Kubernetes Service

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a managed Kubernetes service for Azure that makes it easy to deploy, manage and scale containerized applications. With AKS, you can use the same tooling and procedures across your Kubernetes clusters deployed on-premises or in any cloud provider. This makes it easy to add more capacity or change where you run your cluster without disruption to your applications.

4. Google Kubernetes Engine

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is a managed service that enables you to run containerized applications on Google Cloud Platform. GKE runs the Kubernetes open-source container orchestration system for you, making it simple to deploy and maintain containerized applications.

You can use GKE to create a cluster with a single command, scale it up or down as needed, attach persistent volumes for stateful applications, and manage resources such as CPU and memory. This makes it easy to get started with your application development right away without the hassle of setting up or configuring complex infrastructure components yourself before you can get anything done!

5. Rancher

Rancher is an open source platform for running containers in production. It allows you to run containers on Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm. The project was started by Rancher Labs, which offers commercial support for the platform.

This makes it easy to use if you already have knowledge of Docker or Kubernetes and gives you the option to use Rancher’s UI or set up your own control panel if you prefer that.

The solution comes with great documentation with lots of tutorials which will help get you up and running quickly. It also has a great user interface that makes managing clusters really easy even if this is your first time using Kubernetes-like solutions such as RancherOS (which runs on top of CoreOS) or Cattle (which runs on top of Ubuntu).

There are many Kubernetes alternatives to consider when building your next application. While each has its own unique strengths and weaknesses, we hope that this post gives you a better idea of what is available so that you can make an informed decision about which platform is best suited for your needs.

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