Kubernetes Alternatives

Docker is an open-source platform that automates deployment and development life cycles with OS-level virtualization. These virtualization are called containers and contain application specific operating system, software and configurations that are built on deployment. Containers are encapsulated and work across systems, be it in local development or on production servers, they run anywhere. Docker provides a Community Edition (CE) and an Enterprise Edition (EE) and can be used for personal and enterprise level projects alike.

Red Hat OpenShift is the hybrid cloud platform that contains a family of containerization software products developed by Red Hat. With OpenShift you can manage With OpenShift you can manage Kubernetes containers with full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and edge deployments. Part of OpenShift is the flagship product is the OpenShift Container Platform, an on-premises platform as a service built around Docker containers orchestrated and managed by Kubernetes on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Apache Mesos a free an open-source cluster orchestration platform. It allows you to allocate dynamic resource between applications and enables you to build fault-tolerant and elastic distributed systems. With Apache Mesos, your applications are only aware of the resources of a particular partition or machine they are running on. It also provides an abstract view of all resources used by any application in the system, where you can allocate resource, per application basis. Apache Mesos is battle-tested and industry proven to easily scale to 10,000s of nodes.

K3s is a lightweight Kubernetes distribution by Rancher Labs intended for IoT, Edge, and cloud deployments.

Rancher enables organizations to easily run containers in production. It is a complete free and open-source software stack for teams adopting containers. With Rancher, you no longer have to build a container services platform from scratch by combining various open source technologies. Rancher addresses the operational and security challenges of managing multiple Kubernetes clusters, while providing DevOps teams with integrated tools for running containerized workloads.

Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool. With Ansible you can streamline your deployment process, allowing you to roll out enterprise scale applications with the bush of a button or a command via the terminal. Ansible itself is written in Python and has a minimal learning curve, allowing you to build simple setup procedures that can manage all of your CI/CD needs.

Docker Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications. With Compose, you use a YAML file to configure your application's services. Then, with a single command, you create and start all the services from your configuration. To learn more about all the features of Compose, see the list of features.

Laravel Forge provides instant PHP servers and Laravel Hosting without the nightmares of server management. With Laravel Forge you can provision and deploy unlimited PHP applications on DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, Amazon, Hetzner and other cloud hosting providers. Forge includes an easy to manage user interface that automatically links to your supported cloud hosting provides, or allow you to provision a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or use a custom provider of your choice.

Dokku is a free and open-source project that helps you build and manage the lifecycle of applications. With Dokku developers can setup their own PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) in a matter of minutes. Dokku provides extra plugins which can be used to manage database, and tools needed for your application. If you need to server your application over HTTPS, Dokku got you covered as well, with the help of Let's Encrypts free TLS certificates.

HashiCorp Nomad is a simple and flexible workload orchestrator to deploy and manage containers and non-containerized applications across on-prem and clouds at scale.

Vagrant is an open-source software building portable and virtual development environments. With Vagrant, developers and devops can create development environments that mirror production environment by providing the same operating system, packages, users, and configurations. Vagrant can be spin up environments for VirtualBox, KVM, Hyper-V, Docker containers, VMware, and AWS, and integrates with exiting configuration tooling such as Ansible, Chef, Docker, Puppet or Salt

Docker Swarm is a container orcherstration tool based on Docker. With Docker Swarm you can manage multiple containers deployed across multiple host machines. Current versions of Docker includes swarm mode, which allows you to run Docker Engines as swarms. You can manage your Docker Swarm's with the Docker CLI, to create, deploy and manage your Docker Swarm's.