Best Container Management Software for Linux

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.

Ambassador Edge Stack is a Kubernetes-native API Gateway that delivers the scalability, security, and simplicity for some of the world's largest Kubernetes installations. Edge Stack makes securing microservices easy with a comprehensive set of security functionality, including automatic TLS, authentication, rate limiting, WAF integration, and fine-grained access control. The API Gateway contains a modern Kubernetes ingress controller that supports a broad range of protocols including gRPC and gRPC-Web, supports TLS termination, and provides traffic management controls for resource availability. Why use Ambassador Edge Stack API Gateway? - Accelerate Scalability: Manage high traffic volumes and distribute incoming requests across multiple backend services, ensuring reliable application performance. - Enhanced Security: Protect your APIs from unauthorized access and malicious attacks with robust security features. - Improve Productivity & Developer Experience

Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications, providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks, and application services. It is an open source project and is available through a variety of private cloud distributions and public cloud instances. Cloud Foundry has a container-based architecture that runs apps in any programming language. Deploy apps to CF using your existing tools and with zero modification to the code. Instantiate, deploy, and manage high-availability Kubernetes clusters with CF BOSH on any cloud. By decoupling applications from infrastructure, you can make individual decisions about where to host workloads – on premise, in public clouds, or in managed infrastructures – and move those workloads as necessary in minutes, with no changes to the app.

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.

Low-ops, minimal production Kubernetes, for devs, cloud, clusters, workstations, Edge and IoT. MicroK8s automatically chooses the best nodes for the Kubernetes datastore. When you lose a cluster database node, another node is promoted. No admin needed for your bulletproof edge. MicroK8s is small, with sensible defaults that ‘just work’. A quick install, easy upgrades and great security make it perfect for micro clouds and edge computing. Full enterprise support available, with no subscription needed. Optional 24/7 support with 10 year security maintenance. Under the cell tower. On the racecar. On satellites or everyday appliances, MicroK8s delivers the full Kubernetes experience on IoT and micro clouds. Fully containerized deployment with compressed over-the-air updates for ultra-reliable operations. MicroK8s will apply security updates automatically by default, defer them if you want. Upgrade to a newer version of Kubernetes with a single command. It’s really that easy.

What is Podman? Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode. Simply put: alias docker=podman. Manage pods, containers, and container images. Supporting docker swarm. We believe that Kubernetes is the defacto standard for composing Pods and for orchestrating containers, making Kubernetes YAML a defacto standard file format. Hence, Podman allows the creation and execution of Pods from a Kubernetes YAML file (see podman-play-kube). Podman can also generate Kubernetes YAML based on a container or Pod (see podman-generate-kube), which allows for an easy transition from a local development environment to a production Kubernetes cluster.

An engine purpose-built for embedded and IoT use cases, based on Moby Project technology from Docker. 3.5x smaller than Docker CE, packaged as a single binary. Available for a wide variety of chipset architectures, supporting everything from tiny IoT devices to large industrial gateways. Bandwidth-efficient updates with binary diffs, 10-70x smaller than pulling layers in common scenarios. Extract layers as they arrive to prevent excessive writing to disk, protecting your storage from eventual corruption. Atomic and durable image pulls defend against partial container pulls in the event of power failure. Prevents page cache thrashing during image pull, so your application runs undisturbed in low-memory situations. balenaEngine is a new container engine purpose-built for embedded and IoT use cases and compatible with Docker containers. Based on Moby Project technology from Docker, balenaEngine supports container deltas for 10-70x more efficient bandwidth usage.

LXD is a next generation system container manager. It offers a user experience similar to virtual machines but using Linux containers instead. It's image based with pre-made images available for a wide number of Linux distributions and is built around a very powerful, yet pretty simple, REST API. To get a better idea of what LXD is and what it does, you can try it online! Then if you want to run it locally, take a look at our getting started guide. The LXD project was founded and is currently led by Canonical Ltd with contributions from a range of other companies and individual contributors. The core of LXD is a privileged daemon which exposes a REST API over a local unix socket as well as over the network (if enabled). Clients, such as the command line tool provided with LXD itself then do everything through that REST API. It means that whether you're talking to your local host or a remote server, everything works the same way.

LXC is a userspace interface for the Linux kernel containment features. Through a powerful API and simple tools, it lets Linux users easily create and manage system or application containers. LXC containers are often considered as something in the middle between a chroot and a full fledged virtual machine. The goal of LXC is to create an environment as close as possible to a standard Linux installation but without the need for a separate kernel. LXC is free software, most of the code is released under the terms of the GNU LGPLv2.1+ license, some Android compatibility bits are released under a standard 2-clause BSD license and some binaries and templates are released under the GNU GPLv2 license. LXC's stable release support relies on the Linux distributions and their own commitment to pushing stable fixes and security updates.