Top 7 Kubernetes alternative Tools for Container Orchestration

5 min readJul 7, 2022

Containers are a hot topic in the world of software development. Containerization has changed the way we think about infrastructure and has made it easier to run applications in production. But you don’t need to be a developer or server admin to take advantage of containers.

In this post, I’ll highlight some of my favourite container tools that can help you better manage your infrastructure and make your life easier as an operations professional.

Docker

Docker is a containerization platform designed to make it easy for developers to build, ship and run applications. Docker enables you to package up your application and its dependencies into a standardized unit for software development.

Docker containers are lightweight, portable tools that allow you to immediately deploy your application in any environment. When you use Docker, you can create a container image that contains everything required to run the application (code, runtime, system tools). This includes all necessary dependencies such as libraries and frameworks which are installed automatically when you create the image using Dockerfile instructions. Once an image has been created it can be saved on disk or shared with other people so they can use it too!

Docker uses images as templates for creating new containers using docker engine commands like run -d or Build -t etc..

OpenShift Container Platform

OpenShift is a container application platform, which means it provides the basic building blocks to make deploying and managing containers easier. It’s also a cloud-based container application platform, which means that you can run your applications using OpenShift in the cloud.

OpenShift is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS), meaning that you can use it as an alternative to creating your own infrastructure. It’s also an open source container management platform, so if you want to run an open source version of Kubernetes on your own servers instead of paying for one from Google or Microsoft Azure Cloud Service allows users to opt out of their commercial offerings completely.

Nomad

Nomad is a cluster manager that runs on the Nomad Server, which is the main component of Nomad. The Nomad Server has a REST API and provides functionality for running applications and scheduling jobs.

Nomad’s cluster management capabilities allow you to set up multiple nodes in your system, while also providing basic monitoring functionality. Additionally, you can use it to scale up or down depending on your needs at any given time.

Mesosphere DC/OS

Mesosphere DC/OS is an open source, enterprise-grade container orchestration and automation platform.
DC/OS is a distributed operating system that abstracts any infrastructure layer into a single pool of resources. The Mesosphere DC/OS software enables you to easily deploy applications across clusters of public clouds, private data centers, or both (hybrid cloud).
The Mesosphere DC/OS software can power both on-premises datacenters as well as public cloud environments like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform by using its dedicated Kubernetes distribution called Marathon.

Rancher RKE

Rancher RKE is a command line interface for Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) and OpenShift. Both of these are tools that are used to deploy Kubernetes, which is an open-source project that helps you manage containerized applications across multiple hosts.

OpenShift is an enterprise-grade container application platform built on top of Kubernetes where you can run traditional and cloud-native applications. It supports running both on premises or in the cloud as well as hybrid environments with other platforms like Mesos or Docker Swarm. Nomad is optimized for running containers at scale but also supports legacy applications (like Hadoop) in addition to stateless services like web apps, databases, etc.

Containership

Containership is a container management platform. It can be used to manage containers and Kubernetes, AWS ECS, Docker Swarm, and Mesos.

Use it to create groups of containers that share the same storage volumes and networks. Containership also supports stateful applications like databases or message queues by installing persistent data volumes into your cluster using CRDs, similar to how you would use StatefulSets with Kubernetes.

You can install Containership on any cloud platform including Kubernetes clusters running on Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS), Azure Container Service (ACS), Google Container Engine (GKE) or other platforms like DigitalOcean Droplet and OpenShift v3 Red Hat or Red Hat OpenStack Platform/RDO Atomic Host

Amazon ECS

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable, high-performance container management service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. With Amazon ECS, you don’t need to install and operate your own cluster management infrastructure or worry about configuring jobs. You can use the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI or AWS SDKs to start task definitions and services. The service automatically takes care of provisioning the underlying resources that are required for the containers that are part of those tasks to run.

You can also use third-party schedulers with Amazon ECS; they provide an easy way for users to orchestrate their distributed applications on top of the platform abstractions provided by containers and services offered by Amazon ECS.

Container tools are becoming increasingly popular for deployment.

Container tools are becoming increasingly popular for deployment. You can use these tools to deploy applications and microservices, as well as containers and services.

Container tools are a good option for deploying applications because they’re easy to use, but you need to make sure that each application runs on its own machine so you don’t run into issues with resources. Containerization also makes it easy to update applications or scale them up or down depending on demand, so containerization makes scaling easier than if you were using a traditional approach like virtual machines (VMs).

Conclusion

Hopefully, this list has given you a better understanding of what tools are out there for containers and how to use them. There are many more tools that we didn’t include (and some we probably don’t even know about), but these are the ones that seemed like common sense or were recommended by other people working with containers. Remember: just because something is listed here doesn’t mean it’s the best option for everyone or every situation! If there’s anything else we missed, let us know in the comments below!