What are the best Docker orchestration tools?

Question

14

Options
Considered

149

User
Recs.

Jan 15, 2020

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

The Best 1 of 14 OptionsWhy?

Best Docker orchestration tools	Price	Platforms	Last Updated
90 Kubernetes	Free / paid	-	Jan 15, 2020
82 Docker Swarm	-	-	Jan 11, 2020
-- Nomad	-	-	Dec 9, 2019
-- Docker Compose	Free	-	Sep 17, 2019
-- Minikube	Free	Windows, Linux, Mac	Jan 9, 2020

See Full List

13 Other Options Considered

Docker Swarm

Top Pro

Easy setup

This also means that containers can be launched with a simple docker run command and Swarm will take care of the rest, such as selecting the appropriate host on which to run the container. See More

Top Con

If a node dies in the Swarm Cluster, the containers on that node WILL be started on a another node ...

AssertiveWala's Experience

Simpler to learn than kubernetes. See More

Top Pro

Communicates with other Docker tools easily

Since Docker Swarm is a native Docker tool, it exposes the Docker API, making it possible t integrate it and communicate with other Docker tools (CLI, Compose, Krane, etc.). See More

Top Con

Not fault tolerant

If a node dies in your cluster, the containers on that node won't be restarted See More

Top Pro

Open source

Docker Swarm is open source and provides great guides/documentation for those who want to contribute. See More

Top Con

Bounded by the limitations of the Docker API

If the Docker API doesn't support something, then you are pretty much out of luck when it comes to Docker Swarm, because it won't be supported by Swarm either. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

Docker Swarm is much more lightweight than alternatives: Kubernetes and Mesosphere. Kubernetes, for instance, is very complex - it downloads and installs half of the web, where Docker Swarm has much, much smaller footprint. See More

Top Pro

Compatible with Docker Compose

This gives you a well-rounded workflow. See More

See All

Nomad

Top Pro

Simple, minimal architecture

Being focused on one thing only also has its advantages. For one, Nomad is very simple architecturally. There's only a single binary for both clients and servers, it also does not need any external services for any coordination or storage. See More

Top Con

Only provides cluster management and scheduling

While other orchestration tools provide much more than just cluster management and scheduling (they also provide things like secrets management, discovery, monitoring, etc.), Nomad follows the Unix philosophy of doing only one thing and doing it well, providing only cluster management and scheduling. See More

Top Pro

Complex applications can easily be expressed through Nomad

Nomad uses a high-level abstraction of jobs. Jobs are essentially task groups (sets of tasks). Because of this, Nomad allows users to develop and manage complex applications easily, without having to think about the individual containers that make these applications. See More

Top Pro

More flexibility: not only containers

Nomad also allows scheduling exec, raw exec and download/run of java artifacts on VMs and physical servers. See More

Top Pro

Full fledged integration with the copmrehensive "hashistack"

It fits into Consul (KV management and service discovery) and Vault (for secret management). See More

Top Pro

Big comapnies, like eBay and CircleCI use it

Top Pro

Easy to reason about

Nomad gives a lot of output and is intentionally kept simple. This makes maintenance easy and reduces downtimes. See More

See All

Docker Compose

Top Pro

Easy setup

All that's needed to setup a multi-container application with Compose is a single file configuration file. Finally the application can be spun up with only a single command. See More

Top Con

More geared towards development

No really made for production. See More

Top Pro

Great for local development

Docker-compose isn't really meant (yet) for distributed deployment, but using it to deploy a website locally for testing is awesome. You could use it, with care (like handling faults), on a single server as well. See More

Top Con

Not ready for production yet

While Compose is very good for staging servers, CI and development environments, it's still not ready for production and it's not recommended to be used in production yet. See More

See All

Cloudify - Pure-Play Cloud Orchestration & Automation

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Web

OpenShift

Top Pro

Built-in continuous integration

Continuous integration is not only built-in OpenShift, it's actually a standard part the workflow. See More

Top Con

Official customer support is lacking

OpenShift seems to rely more on written documentation and on the community to solve any problem users may have. The forums and IRC channel are active and very helpful, but the official customer support could be better. See More

SophisticatedParthenos's Experience

More enterprise level features See More

Top Pro

Can be used to introduce specialized tasks through the application hosted on it

Because of its high flexibility and customization power, OpenShift can be used to create specialized tasks for the application being hosted on it. For example, an entire array of dynos (also known as gears) can be dedicated to media transcoding in order to build a custom media converter infrastructure. See More

Top Pro

Small learning curve

Learning to use OpenShift is pretty easy. Most environments can be set up in a few simple steps and for everything else the official documentation and third-party resources are extremely helpful. See More

See All

Rancher

Top Pro

Web GUI cluster management

Intuitive and easy to use web gui. See More

Top Con

Not supporting the latest docker (security) versions

Not working with the newest docker (and composer) versions.! I only use the latest stable or beta (for testing) software on a local machine. Rancher was and is producing a lot of irritating messages or errors. See More

VersatileShurpanakha's Experience

Not working with the newest docker (and composer) versions.! I only use the latest stable or beta (for testing) software on a local machine. Rancher was and is producing a lot of irritating messages or errors. See More

Top Pro

Service catalog is easy

Rancher provides a catalog of application templates that make it easy to deploy complex stacks. Rancher certified catalog Community service catalog See More

Top Con

Not supporting the latest docker (security) versions

Not working with the newest docker (and composer) versions.! I only use the latest stable or beta (for testing) software on a local machine. Rancher was and is producing a lot of irritating messages or errors. See More

Top Pro

Access control polices

Detailed role-based access control policies can be defined independently for each cluster. See More

Top Pro

Self-service application stack for self-monitoring

Great contributions from the co community who build the service stack catalog. One of them is the "Prometheus" template which deploys a collection of containers for monitoring a platform. It's capable of querying all aspects of your environment with some nice pre-built dashboards. See More

Top Pro

Mult-environment cluster system

Cattle (Rancher default) Swarm Kubernetes Mesos See More

See All

Amazon ECS

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Giant Swarm

Top Pro

Very good documentation

Focuses on micro services (and not just containers). See More

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score 39 · Accepted Answer

Kubernetes

Top Pro

Open Source

Kubernetes is free and open source. See More

Top Con

Cannot define containers through the Docker CLI

Kubernetes was not written for docker clustering alone. It uses a different API, configuration and different YAML definitions. So you can't use the Docker CLI or Docker Compose to define your containers. Everything has to be done from scratch. See More

DelightfulKinieGer's Experience

Vibrant and Diversified dev community. Kubernetes is here to stay..Top tech giants seemt to have agreed to cooperate around the base technology and compete on higher level tools.. Recent CNCF's announcement wrt Top tech companies (like Google, Red Hat, CoreOS, FathomDB, ZTE Corporation, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Fujitsu, and Mirantis.) agreeing to a Kubernetes Certification standard is a major step towards having a dominant cloud agnostic Container Orchestration platform (and no fear or forks in the near-term). See More

Top Pro

Built on several years of experience with containers

Kubernetes was built on top of several years of experience from Google working on containers in production. It's a little opinionated on how containers should work and behave, but if used correctly it can help you achieve fault-tolerant systems. See More

Top Con

Windows restrictions

Windows compatibility rules, the host OS version must match the container base image OS version. Only Windows containers with Windows Server 2019 are supported. Also other restrictions are present. See More

Elias Van Ootegem's Experience

docker + k8s have been, and will be the standard. It's production ready, and easy to use, and can only get better See More

Top Pro

Fault tolerant

Almost everything in Kubernetes is designed to handle if parts of it fail or if your service crashed for whatever reason. So it's particularly adapted if you've a cluster (even a very small one). See More

Top Con

If used on an existing system, some re-organizing may be needed

Because of how opinionated Kubernetes is, it may be necessary to change some things if you decide to use Kubernetes as an orchestration tool in an existing application. See More

Top Pro

Works well with modern operating systems

Kubernetes works very well with modern environments (such as CoreOS or Red Hat Atomc) which offer lightweight computing nodes that you don't have to manage, since they are managed for you. See More

Top Con

Sometimes Pods refuse to (re)start automatically

It happens that a Pod needs a manual kick before it runs properly, especially if you're near full utilisation of your machine resources. Sometimes it is just a long delay. See More

Top Pro

Supported on several PaaS

Kubernetes is currently supported by Google Compute Engine, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, and vSphere. Work is being done to support Kubernetes on OpenShift and CloudFoundry. See More

Top Pro

Easy to do grouping tasks

Kubernetes uses labels which are key-value pairs that are attached to objects, usually pods. They are used to specify the characteristics of an object like the version, tier, etc. Labels are used to identify objects or groups of objects according to different characteristics that they may have, for example they can be used to identify all the pods that are included in the backend tier. Through labels it's easier to do grouping tasks for pods or containers, like moving pods to different groups or assigning them to load-balanced groups. See More

Top Pro

Great starting point for beginners

Kubernetes great for beginners who are just starting to work on clustering. It's probably the quickest and easiest way to start experimenting and learning cluster oriented development. See More

See All

The Best 1 of 14 OptionsWhy?

My Recommendation for Kubernetes

My Recommendation for Kubernetes

Open Source

Cannot define containers through the Docker CLI

Built on several years of experience with containers

Windows restrictions

Fault tolerant

If used on an existing system, some re-organizing may be needed

Works well with modern operating systems

Sometimes Pods refuse to (re)start automatically

Supported on several PaaS

Easy to do grouping tasks

Great starting point for beginners

13 Other Options Considered

My Recommendation for Docker Swarm

My Recommendation for Docker Swarm

Easy setup

If a node dies in the Swarm Cluster, the containers on that node WILL be started on a another node ...

Communicates with other Docker tools easily

Not fault tolerant

Open source

Bounded by the limitations of the Docker API

Lightweight

Compatible with Docker Compose

My Recommendation for Nomad

My Recommendation for Nomad

Simple, minimal architecture

Only provides cluster management and scheduling

Complex applications can easily be expressed through Nomad

More flexibility: not only containers

Full fledged integration with the copmrehensive "hashistack"

Big comapnies, like eBay and CircleCI use it

Easy to reason about

My Recommendation for Docker Compose

My Recommendation for Docker Compose

Easy setup

More geared towards development

Great for local development

Not ready for production yet

My Recommendation for Minikube

My Recommendation for Minikube

Free

Not for production

Addons

Supports Windows 10 Home

My Recommendation for Cloudify - Pure-Play Cloud Orchestration & Automation

My Recommendation for Cloudify - Pure-Play Cloud Orchestration & Automation

My Recommendation for OpenShift

My Recommendation for OpenShift

Built-in continuous integration

Official customer support is lacking

Can be used to introduce specialized tasks through the application hosted on it

Small learning curve

My Recommendation for Rancher

My Recommendation for Rancher

Web GUI cluster management

Not supporting the latest docker (security) versions

Service catalog is easy

Not supporting the latest docker (security) versions

Access control polices

Self-service application stack for self-monitoring

Mult-environment cluster system

My Recommendation for ContainerShip

My Recommendation for ContainerShip

ContainerShip Core is open source

Built-in load balancing

Github and Bitbucket integrations

My Recommendation for Marathon on Apache Mesos

My Recommendation for Marathon on Apache Mesos

Extremely fault-tolerant

Mesos is battle-tested at scale in production

Scalable to 10,000s of containers

Free and Open Source

Also supports non-Docker cgroups containers

My Recommendation for Amazon ECS

My Recommendation for Amazon ECS

My Recommendation for AZK

My Recommendation for AZK

Soft learning curve