Best Container Management Software Platforms of 2024

Amazon EKS Anywhere, a new Amazon EKS deployment option, allows you to create and manage Kubernetes clusters anywhere. This includes on your own virtual machines (VMs), and bare metal servers. EKS Anywhere offers an easy-to-install software package that allows you to create and operate Kubernetes clusters. It also includes automation tools for supporting the cluster's lifecycle. EKS Anywhere provides a consistent AWS management experience for your data center. It builds on the strengths and capabilities of Amazon EKS Distro (the same Kubernetes which powers EKS on AWS). EKS Anywhere makes it easy to buy or build your own management tools. It allows you to create EKS Distro clusters and update software. You can also handle backup and recovery. EKS Anywhere allows you to automate cluster management, reduce support cost, and eliminate redundant effort of using multiple open-source or third-party tools to operate Kubernetes clusters. AWS fully supports EKS Anywhere.

A Moby Project engine from Docker that is specifically designed for embedded and IoT use. It is 3.5x smaller than Docker CE and packaged as one binary. There are many chipset architectures that can be used to support everything from small IoT devices to large industrial gateways. Bandwidth-efficient updates using binary diffs are 10-70x less than pulling layers in most scenarios. To prevent unnecessary writing to disk, extract layers as they arrive. This protects your storage from possible corruption. In the event of power outage, durable and atomic image pulls protect against partial container pulls. Image pull prevents page cache thrashing, so your application runs unaffected in low-memory environments. balenaEngine, a new container engine designed for embedded and IoT use and compatible with Docker containers, is now available. BalenaEngine, which is based on Docker's Moby Project technology, supports container deltas that provide 10-70x more efficient bandwidth usage.

With VMware Tanzu Kubernetes grid, you can power your modern applications. For a consistent, secure experience, all developers can use the same K8s in data center, edge, and public cloud. Your workloads should be kept secure and isolated. You can get a complete Kubernetes runtime that is easy to upgrade with preintegrated, validated components. Scale all clusters with no downtime Security fixes can be applied quickly. You can run containerized applications on a Kubernetes certified distribution. This distribution is supported by the global Kubernetes network. Your existing data center tools, workflows, and data centers can be used to provide developers secure, self-serve, access to conformant Kubernetes clouds in your VMware private cloud. You can also extend the same Kubernetes runtime to your public cloud or edge environments. You can simplify operations in large-scale, multicluster Kubernetes environments and keep your workloads isolated. Automate lifecycle management to reduce risk and shift your focus towards strategic work.

SUSE Rancher is designed to meet the needs of DevOps teams that deploy Kubernetes applications and IT operations that deliver enterprise-critical services. SUSE Rancher supports any CNCF certified Kubernetes distribution. We offer the RKE for on-premises workloads. We support all public cloud distributions, such as EKS, AKS and GKE. We also offer K3s at the edge. SUSE Rancher allows for simple, consistent cluster operations. This includes provisioning, version management and visibility and diagnostics, monitoring, alerting, monitoring and auditing, as well as provisioning, version control, visibility and diagnosis, monitoring and alerting, and central audit. SUSE Rancher allows you to automate processes and apply a consistent set user access and security policies to all your clusters, regardless of where they are located. SUSE Rancher offers a wide range of services to help you build, deploy, and scale containerized applications. These include app packaging, CI/CD monitoring, logging, and service mesh.

K3s is a highly available, certified Kubernetes distribution designed for production workloads in unattended, resource-constrained, remote locations or inside IoT appliances. Binaries and multiarch images are available for both ARM64 and ARMv7. K3s can be used on anything from a Raspberry Pi to a 32GiB AWS server. Sqlite3 is the default storage method for light-weight storage backends. Also available: etcd3, MySQL, Postgres. Secure by default with reasonable defaults in light environments. A local storage provider, a service balancer, a Helm control, and the Traefik Ingress controller are all simple but powerful features that have been "batteries-included". All Kubernetes control-plan components are encapsulated in one binary and process. This allows K3s automate complex cluster operations such as distributing certificates.

IBM Storage for Red Hat OpenShift combines traditional and container storage to make it easier to deploy enterprise-class scale out microservices architectures. Valid for Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes, IBM Cloud Pak and Red Hat OpenShift. For an integrated experience, it simplifies deployment and management. Red Hat OpenShift environments provide enterprise data protection, automated scheduling, data reuse support, and enterprise data protection. You can block, file, and object data resources. You can quickly deploy what you need, when you need it. IBM Storage for Red Hat OpenShift offers the infrastructure foundation and storage orchestration required to build a robust, agile hybrid cloud environment. IBM supports CSI in its block and file storage families to increase container utilization in Kubernetes environments.

Connect your private registries easily and share images with the team. To find the right container image to fit your project, browse the largest public registries in the world. Software security is impossible if you don't know what's inside your containers. The Slim platform removes the veil from container internals, allowing you to analyze, optimize, compare, and compare changes across multiple versions or containers. DockerSlim is an open-source project that automatically optimizes container images. You can eliminate dangerous or bulky packages so that you only ship what you need. Learn how the Slim platform can help you and your team automatically improve security and software supply chain security, tune containers to ensure development, testing, production, and shipping secure container-based apps to cloud. The platform is free to use and accounts are available for no cost. We are container enthusiasts, not salespeople. Therefore, we understand that privacy and security are fundamental principles of our business.

You can accelerate your development by using a storage platform that integrates with Kubernetes. While you focus on running your application we ensure that you have the persistent volumes you need to give you the stability and scale you require. Integrating stateful storage into Kubernetes will simplify your app modernization process and increase efficiency. You can run your database or any other persistent workload in a Kubernetes-based environment without worrying about managing the storage layer. Ondat allows you to provide a consistent storage layer across all platforms. We provide persistent volumes that allow you to run your own databases, without having to pay for expensive hosted options. Kubernetes data layer management is yours to take back. Kubernetes-native storage that supports dynamic provisioning. It works exactly as it should. API-driven, tight integration to your containerized applications.

kpt is a package-centric, toolchain that allows for a WYSIWYG configuration authoring and automation experience. This simplifies Kubernetes platforms, KRM-driven infrastructure, and Kubernetes platforms at scale by manipulating declarative configura as data, separate from the code that transforms them. Kubernetes users manage their resources using either conventional imperative graphical user interfaces or command-line tools (kubectl), or automation (e.g. operators) that directly operate against Kubernetes APIs or declarative configuration tools such as Helm, Terraform or cdk8s. This is mostly due to familiarity and preference on a small scale. It becomes more difficult to create and enforce consistent configurations and security policies in a growing environment as companies increase the number of Kubernetes production and development clusters they use.

Nutanix Kubernetes Engine is an enterprise Kubernetes management tool that can help you speed up your journey to production-ready Kubernetes. NKE allows you to manage a Kubernetes environment that is ready for production. It's easy to use and push-button simple. You can deploy and configure production-ready Kubernetes Clusters in minutes instead of days or even weeks. NKE's easy workflow makes it easy to automatically configure and deploy Kubernetes clusters. Every NKE Kubernetes cluster comes with a Nutanix fully-featured CSI driver. This natively integrates with Volumes Block Storage, Files Storage, and allows for persistent storage for containerized apps. You can add Kubernetes worker Nodes in a single click. Expanding the cluster is as easy as adding additional resources.

Developers and operations teams will be delighted by the self-service and automation that they require. This is achieved with the right combination of standardization, control, and control that the business demands. Centrally manage configurations (in Git), for clusters that include security policy and software addons like service mesh, ingress controllers and monitoring. Blueprints and addon lifecycle management are easily applied to both brownfield and greenfield clusters. Blueprints can be shared among multiple teams to facilitate central governance of add-ons distributed across the fleet. Users can move from a Git push to an updated app on managed clusters in just seconds, 100+ times per day, for environments that require agile development cycles. This is especially useful for environments that require frequent updates.

Kata Containers is Apache 2 software. It consists of two main components: Kata Agent and Kata Containerd Shim v2 runtime. It also includes a Linux kernel, versions of QEMU and Cloud Hypervisor, as well as Firecracker hypervisors. Kata Containers are light and fast, integrate with container management layers (including popular orchestration tools like Docker and Kubernetes), and offer the security benefits of VMs. Kata Containers currently supports Linux (host or guest). We have instructions for installing several popular distributions on the host side. Clear Linux, Fedora and CentOS 7 rootfs images are available out-of-the box through the OSBuilder. This can also be used to roll guest images.

Create apps that run anywhere, publish, share them with the community and deploy them to the edge globally. You can serve sandboxed WebAssembly applications anywhere using a single runtime. This will allow you to do in days what other people do in months. The days of using a binary on each platform and chip are over. Lightweight containerized apps run anywhere. Supports nearly every programming language. Truly universal. Runs everywhere and as fast as native. No longer are packages limited by their language. Contribute your own packages, collaborate across stacks and leverage the ecosystem. You can have the scalability and reusability that comes with serverless, but also the scalability and reusability that comes with the cloud. Save your users' time and money by deploying to the edge. Faster, more affordable and infinitely scalable. All languages are containerized and collaborative. Plug in your own backend or compiler. Run apps at speeds close to native and outperform your competition.

Prioritize the most important risks for your business with clear and actionable insights. Harden your Kubernetes availability continuously. Avoid making the same mistakes as others. Eliminate risks prior to incidents. Keep up-to-date with visibility across your entire infrastructure. Catalog containers, clusters and dependencies. Consolidate insights from cloud, on-prem and more. Receive alerts about all EOL versions and incompatible versions. Never again use spreadsheets or scripts. Chkk's goal is to empower developers to prevent incidents by learning from other developers and not repeating mistakes. Chkk's collective-learning technology collects and curates errors, failures, disruptions, and other known incidents that the Kubernetes Community (including users/operators and cloud providers) have experienced, ensuring past mistakes aren't repeated.

Deploying container-based web applications has never been easier. Web App for Containers can deploy containerized apps with your chosen dependencies in production within seconds by pulling images from Docker Hub, Azure Container Registry or private Azure Container Registry. The platform takes care of OS patches, capacity provisioning and load balancing. Automatically scale vertically or horizontally according to application needs. Granular scaling rules can be used to automatically handle peak workloads while minimizing costs at off-peak hours. With just a few mouse clicks, you can deploy data and host services to multiple locations.

Spectro Cloud is the only cloud platform that allows organizations to manage Kubernetes at scale, in production. Palette is a management platform that provides seamless control of the entire Kubernetes Lifecycle across clouds, datacenters, bare metal, and edge environments.

Lightbend technology allows developers to quickly build data-centric applications that can handle the most complex, distributed applications and streaming data streams. Lightbend is used by companies around the world to address the problems of distributed, real-time data to support their most important business initiatives. Akka Platform is a platform that makes it easy for businesses build, deploy, manage, and maintain large-scale applications that support digitally transformational initiatives. Reactive microservices are a way to accelerate time-to-value, reduce infrastructure costs, and lower cloud costs. They take full advantage the distributed nature cloud and are highly efficient, resilient to failure, and able to operate at any scale. Native support for encryption, data destruction, TLS enforcement and compliance with GDPR. Framework to quickly build, deploy and manage streaming data pipelines.

LXD is the next generation system container manager. It provides a similar user experience to virtual machines, but with Linux containers instead. It is image-based and has pre-made images for a variety of Linux distributions. It is built around a powerful, but simple, REST API. You can get a better understanding of LXD and its capabilities by trying it online. If you are interested in running it locally, then take a look to our getting started guide. Canonical Ltd founded the LXD project and leads it today. Contributions from other companies and individuals are also welcome. LXD's core is a privileged daemon that exposes a REST API both over a local socket and over the network (if it is enabled). Clients, such the command line tool included with LXD, then access that REST API to perform all tasks. This means that everything works the same regardless of whether you are talking to a local host or remote server.

LXC is the userspace interface to the Linux kernel containment features. It allows Linux users to create and manage system and application containers using a simple API and simple tools. LXC containers can be described as something that is somewhere in between a chroot or a fully fledged virtual machine. LXC aims to provide an environment that is as close to a standard Linux installation as possible, but without the need to use a separate kernel. LXC is free software. Most of the code is released under GNU LGPLv2.1+, some Android compatibility bits under a standard 2-clause BSD licence, and some binaries, templates, and binaries are released under GNU GPLv2.

Deep Learning Containers are Docker images pre-installed with the most popular deep learning frameworks. Deep Learning Containers allow you to quickly deploy custom ML environments without the need to build and optimize them from scratch. You can quickly deploy deep learning environments using prepackaged, fully tested Docker images. Integrate Amazon SageMaker, Amazon EKS and Amazon ECS to create custom ML workflows that can be used for validation, training, and deployment.

Our platform gives web developers new power and improves the overall process of developing, deploying, and managing web applications. This is possible thanks to ScaleDynamics exclusive module-as-a service concept. Your team discovers a new development experience that focuses only on features. Your team discovers a new experience in development that focuses only on features. Did you know that 75% of developers spend their time coding communication layers? Any JavaScript Node.js JavaScript module can be transformed into a Module as a Service, (MaaS), that will run on the Cloud after deployment. JavaScript calls can be used to import module from your frontend. You can use it as any other module, without the need for HTTP.

Red Kubes, a Dutch start up, was founded in 2019 by Sander Rodenhuis and Maurice Faber. After years of operating Kubernetes clusters, we noticed that organizations were having trouble keeping up with the growing complexity of Kubernetes. Otomi Container Platform is our first product. It's a value-added layer that sits on top Kubernetes. This makes Kubernetes fun and easy.