Best Container Management Software Platforms for Rancher

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.

Pay-as-you-go security and observability SaaS platform for containers, Kubernetes, and cloud. Get a live view of dependencies and how all the services are communicating with each other in a multi-cluster, hybrid and multi-cloud environment. Eliminate setup and onboarding steps and troubleshoot your Kubernetes security and observability issues within minutes. Calico Cloud is a next-generation security and observability SaaS platform for containers, Kubernetes, and cloud. It enables organizations of all sizes to protect their cloud workloads and containers, detect threats, achieve continuous compliance, and troubleshoot service issues in real-time across multi-cluster, multi-cloud, and hybrid deployments. Calico Cloud is built on Calico Open Source, the most widely adopted container networking and security solution. Instead of managing a platform for container and Kubernetes security and observability, teams consume it as a managed service for faster analysis, relevant actions, etc.

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.

SUSE Rancher addresses the needs of DevOps teams deploying applications with Kubernetes and IT operations delivering enterprise-critical services. SUSE Rancher supports any CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution. For on-premises workloads, we offer the RKE. We support all the public cloud distributions, including EKS, AKS, and GKE. At the edge, we offer K3s. SUSE Rancher provides simple, consistent cluster operations, including provisioning, version management, visibility and diagnostics, monitoring and alerting, and centralized audit. SUSE Rancher lets you automate processes and applies a consistent set of user access and security policies for all your clusters, no matter where they’re running. SUSE Rancher provides a rich catalogue of services for building, deploying, and scaling containerized applications, including app packaging, CI/CD, logging, monitoring, 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. Both ARM64 and ARMv7 are supported with binaries and multiarch images available for both. K3s works great from something as small as a Raspberry Pi to an AWS a1.4xlarge 32GiB server. Lightweight storage backend based on sqlite3 as the default storage mechanism. etcd3, MySQL, Postgres also still available. Secure by default with reasonable defaults for lightweight environments. Simple but powerful “batteries-included” features have been added, such as: a local storage provider, a service load balancer, a Helm controller, and the Traefik ingress controller. Operation of all Kubernetes control plane components is encapsulated in a single binary and process. This allows K3s to automate and manage complex cluster operations like distributing certificates.

Accelerate your development by using a storage layer that works natively with your Kubernetes environment. Focus on running your application, while we make sure you have the persistent volumes that give you the scale and stability you need. Reduce complexity and increase efficiency in your app modernization journey by truly integrating stateful storage into Kubernetes. Run your database or any persistent workload in a Kubernetes environment without having to worry about managing the storage layer. Ondat gives you the ability to deliver a consistent storage layer across any platform. We give you the persistent volumes to allow you to run your own databases without paying for expensive hosted options. Take back control of your data layer in Kubernetes. Kubernetes-native storage with dynamic provisioning that works as it should. Fully API-driven, tight integration with your containerized applications.

Delight developers and operations teams with the self-service and automation they need, with the right mix of standardization and control that the business requires. Centrally specify and manage configurations (in Git) for clusters encompassing security policy and software add-ons such as service mesh, ingress controllers, monitoring, logging, and backup and restore solutions. Blueprints and add-on lifecycle management can easily be applied to greenfield and brownfield clusters centrally. Blueprints can also be shared across multiple teams for centralized governance of add-ons deployed across the fleet. For environments requiring agile development cycles, users can go from a Git push to an updated application on managed clusters in seconds — 100+ times a day. This is particularly suited for developer environments where updates are very frequent.