Best Cluster Management Software for Windows

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service. Customers such as Duolingo, Samsung, GE, and Cook Pad use ECS to run their most sensitive and mission-critical applications because of its security, reliability, and scalability. ECS is a great choice to run containers for several reasons. First, you can choose to run your ECS clusters using AWS Fargate, which is serverless compute for containers. Fargate removes the need to provision and manage servers, lets you specify and pay for resources per application, and improves security through application isolation by design. Second, ECS is used extensively within Amazon to power services such as Amazon SageMaker, AWS Batch, Amazon Lex, and Amazon.com’s recommendation engine, ensuring ECS is tested extensively for security, reliability, and availability.

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery. Kubernetes builds upon 15 years of experience of running production workloads at Google, combined with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community. Designed on the same principles that allows Google to run billions of containers a week, Kubernetes can scale without increasing your ops team. Whether testing locally or running a global enterprise, Kubernetes flexibility grows with you to deliver your applications consistently and easily no matter how complex your need is. Kubernetes is open source giving you the freedom to take advantage of on-premises, hybrid, or public cloud infrastructure, letting you effortlessly move workloads to where it matters to you.

The Kubernetes platform for big ideas. Empower developers to innovate and ship faster with the leading hybrid cloud, enterprise container platform. Red Hat OpenShift offers automated installation, upgrades, and lifecycle management throughout the container stack—the operating system, Kubernetes and cluster services, and applications—on any cloud. Red Hat OpenShift helps teams build with speed, agility, confidence, and choice. Code in production mode anywhere you choose to build. Get back to doing work that matters. Red Hat OpenShift is focused on security at every level of the container stack and throughout the application lifecycle. It includes long-term, enterprise support from one of the leading Kubernetes contributors and open source software companies. Support the most demanding workloads including AI/ML, Java, data analytics, databases, and more. Automate deployment and life-cycle management with our vast ecosystem of technology partners.

Appvia Wayfinder is a trusted infrastructure operations platform designed to increase developer velocity. It enables platform teams to operate at scale by providing self-service guardrails for standardisation. Supporting integration with AWS, Azure, and more, Wayfinder offers self-service provisioning of environments and cloud resources using a catalogue of manageable Terraform modules. Its built-in principles of isolation and least privilege ensure secure default configurations, while granting fine-grained control to platform teams over underlying CRDs. It offers centralized control and visibility over clusters, apps, and cloud resources across various clouds. Additionally, Wayfinder's cloud automation capability supports safe deployments and upgrades through the use of ephemeral clusters and namespaces. Choose Appvia Wayfinder for streamlined, secure, and efficient infrastructure management.

Welcome to K8 Studio, your ultimate cross-platform client IDE for effortless Kubernetes cluster management. Seamlessly deploy to popular platforms such as EKS, GKE, AKS, or your dedicated bare metal setup. Experience the power of connecting to your cluster with an intuitive interface, providing a visual representation of nodes, pods, services, and more. Gain instant access to logs, detailed element descriptions, and a bash terminal, all with a simple click. Elevate your Kubernetes experience with K8Studio's user-friendly features. The grid view allows for a comprehensive tabular display of all Kubernetes objects. The left bar enables the selection of specific object types, and this view is entirely interactive and updated in real time. Users can seamlessly search and filter objects by namespace, and rearrange columns. Organizes workloads, services, ingresses, and volumes by namespace and instance. Visualize object connections for a rapid pod count and status check.

Most Kubernetes platforms let you spin up and manage Kubernetes clusters. Loft doesn't. Loft is an advanced control plane that runs on top of your existing Kubernetes clusters to add multi-tenancy and self-service capabilities to these clusters to get the full value out of Kubernetes beyond cluster management. Loft provides a powerful UI and CLI but under the hood, it is 100% Kubernetes, so you can control everything via kubectl and the Kubernetes API, which guarantees great integration with existing cloud-native tooling. Building open-source software is part of our DNA. Loft Labs is CNCF and Linux Foundation member. Loft allows companies to empower their employees to spin up low-cost, low-overhead Kubernetes environments for a variety of use cases.

Create, manage, operate, and optimize HPC and big compute clusters of any scale. Deploy full clusters and other resources, including scheduler, compute VMs, storage, networking, and cache. Customize and optimize clusters through advanced policy and governance features, including cost controls, Active Directory integration, monitoring, and reporting. Use your current job scheduler and applications without modification. Give admins full control over which users can run jobs, as well as where and at what cost. Take advantage of built-in autoscaling and battle-tested reference architectures for a wide range of HPC workloads and industries. CycleCloud supports any job scheduler or software stack—from proprietary in-house to open-source, third-party, and commercial applications. Your resource demands evolve over time, and your cluster should, too. With scheduler-aware autoscaling, you can fit your resources to your workload.

Windows Admin Center is a locally deployed, browser-based management toolset that enables IT administrators to manage Windows Servers, clusters, hyper-converged infrastructure, and Windows 10 or later PCs without the need for cloud connectivity. It serves as the modern evolution of traditional in-box management tools like Server Manager and Microsoft Management Console (MMC), offering a streamlined and integrated experience. Provides a unified interface to manage multiple server environments, including physical, virtual, on-premises, and cloud-based servers, facilitating tasks such as configuration, troubleshooting, and maintenance. Seamlessly extends on-premises deployments to Azure, enabling hybrid management scenarios. This integration allows for the utilization of Azure services like backup, disaster recovery, monitoring, and update management directly through the Windows Admin Center interface.

OpenSVC is an open source software solution designed to enhance IT productivity by providing tools for service mobility, clustering, container orchestration, configuration management, and comprehensive infrastructure auditing. The platform comprises two main components. The agent functions as a supervisor, clusterware, container orchestrator, and configuration manager, facilitating the deployment, management, and scaling of services across diverse environments, including on-premises, virtual machines, and cloud instances. It supports various operating systems such as Unix, Linux, BSD, macOS, and Windows, and offers features like cluster DNS, backend networks, ingress gateways, and scalers. The collector aggregates data reported by agents and fetches information from the site's infrastructure, including networks, SANs, storage arrays, backup servers, and asset managers. It serves as a reliable, flexible, and secure data store.

Mesos is built using the same principles as the Linux kernel, only at a different level of abstraction. The Mesos kernel runs on every machine and provides applications (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Elasticsearch) with API’s for resource management and scheduling across entire datacenter and cloud environments. Native support for launching containers with Docker and AppC images.Support for running cloud native and legacy applications in the same cluster with pluggable scheduling policies. HTTP APIs for developing new distributed applications, for operating the cluster, and for monitoring. Built-in Web UI for viewing cluster state and navigating container sandboxes.

A simple and flexible workload orchestrator to deploy and manage containers and non-containerized applications across on-prem and clouds at scale. Single 35MB binary that integrates into existing infrastructure. Easy to operate on-prem or in the cloud with minimal overhead. Orchestrate applications of any type - not just containers. First class support for Docker, Windows, Java, VMs, and more. Bring orchestration benefits to existing services. Achieve zero downtime deployments, improved resilience, higher resource utilization, and more without containerization. Single command for multi-region, multi-cloud federation. Deploy applications globally to any region using Nomad as a single unified control plane. One single unified workflow for deploying to bare metal or cloud environments. Enable multi-cloud applications with ease. Nomad integrates seamlessly with Terraform, Consul and Vault for provisioning, service networking, and secrets management.

DxEnterprise is multi-platform Smart Availability software built on patented technology for Windows Server, Linux and Docker. It can be used to manage a variety of workloads at the instance level—as well as Docker containers. DxEnterprise (DxE) is particularly optimized for native or containerized Microsoft SQL Server deployments on any platform. It is also adept at management of Oracle on Windows. In addition to Windows file shares and services, DxE supports any Docker container on Windows or Linux, including Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, and other relational database management systems. It also supports cloud-native SQL Server availability groups (AGs) in containers, including support for Kubernetes clusters, across mixed environments and any type of infrastructure. DxE integrates seamlessly with Azure shared disks, enabling optimal high availability for clustered SQL Server instances in the cloud.

Evidian SafeKit is a high-availability software solution designed to ensure the redundancy of critical applications on Windows and Linux platforms. It provides an all-in-one approach by integrating load balancing, synchronous real-time file replication, automatic application failover, and automated failback after a server failure, all within a single software product. This eliminates the need for additional hardware components such as network load balancers or shared disks, as well as the necessity for enterprise editions of operating systems and databases. SafeKit's software clustering facilitates the creation of mirror clusters with real-time data replication and failover, farm clusters with load balancing and failover, and advanced architectures like farm+mirror clusters and active-active clusters. Its shared-nothing architecture simplifies deployment, even in remote sites, by avoiding the complexities associated with shared disk clusters.

Data Flow Manager (DFM) is a purpose-built tool to deploy and promote Apache NiFi data flows within minutes – no need for NiFi UI and controller services, 100% on-premises with zero cloud dependency. Designed for organizations prioritizing data sovereignty, DFM eliminates vendor lock-in and cloud exposure. With a simple pay-per-node model, you can run unlimited NiFi data flows without paying for extra CPUs. DFM automates and accelerates deployment across environments with features like NiFi data flow deployment, scheduling, and promotion in just a few minutes. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), complete audit logging, and built-in performance analytics give teams control and visibility over their data operations. DFM’s AI-powered NiFi Data Flow Creation Assistant helps teams build better NiFi data flows, faster. Its structure and performance analysis tools ensure your NiFi flows are optimized from the start. Backed by 24x7 NiFi expert support and a 99.99% uptime guarantee,

Current versions of Docker include swarm mode for natively managing a cluster of Docker Engines called a swarm. Use the Docker CLI to create a swarm, deploy application services to a swarm, and manage swarm behavior. Cluster management integrated with Docker Engine: Use the Docker Engine CLI to create a swarm of Docker Engines where you can deploy application services. You don’t need additional orchestration software to create or manage a swarm. Decentralized design: Instead of handling differentiation between node roles at deployment time, the Docker Engine handles any specialization at runtime. You can deploy both kinds of nodes, managers and workers, using the Docker Engine. This means you can build an entire swarm from a single disk image. Declarative service model: Docker Engine uses a declarative approach to let you define the desired state of the various services in your application stack.

Apache Helix is a generic cluster management framework used for the automatic management of partitioned, replicated and distributed resources hosted on a cluster of nodes. Helix automates reassignment of resources in the face of node failure and recovery, cluster expansion, and reconfiguration. To understand Helix, you first need to understand cluster management. A distributed system typically runs on multiple nodes for the following reasons: scalability, fault tolerance, load balancing. Each node performs one or more of the primary functions of the cluster, such as storing and serving data, producing and consuming data streams, and so on. Once configured for your system, Helix acts as the global brain for the system. It is designed to make decisions that cannot be made in isolation. While it is possible to integrate these functions into the distributed system, it complicates the code.

ManageEngine DDI Central is designed to streamline network management for enterprises, offering a unified platform for DNS, DHCP, and IPAM. DDI Central as an overlay, discovers and integrates data across both on-premises as well as remote DNS-DHCP clusters. Enterprises gain holistic visibility and control of their network infrastructure, including remote branch offices. With smart automation features, real-time analytics, and advanced security protocols, DDI Central enhances operational efficiency, visibility, and network security, all from a single console. Features: Flexible internal and external DNS and DHCP cluster management Streamlined DNS server and zone management Automated DHCP scope management Targeted IP configurations with DHCP fingerprinting Secure dynamic DNS (DDNS) management DNS aging and scavenging DNS security management Domain traffic surveillance IP lease history insights IP-DNS correlations and IP-MAC identity mapping Built-in failover & auditing