Best Container Management Software for Linux
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Compare the Top Container Management Software for Linux as of April 2025
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What is Container Management Software for Linux?
Container management software platforms help organizations deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications across multiple environments. These platforms streamline the orchestration of containers, allowing businesses to automate the deployment, scaling, and operation of application containers. They typically support Kubernetes, Docker, or other container orchestration technologies to manage clusters of containers. Container management platforms improve efficiency by enabling developers to focus on building applications rather than worrying about the underlying infrastructure. They also provide monitoring, logging, and security features to ensure that applications run smoothly and securely in production. Compare and read user reviews of the best Container Management software for Linux currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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1
Kasm Workspaces
Kasm Technologies
Kasm Workspaces streams your workplace environment directly to your web browser…on any device and from any location. Kasm uses our high-performance streaming and secure isolation technology to provide web-native Desktop as a Service (DaaS), application streaming, and secure/private web browsing. Kasm is not just a service; it is a highly configurable platform with a robust developer API and devops-enabled workflows that can be customized for your use-case, at any scale. Workspaces can be deployed in the cloud (Public or Private), on-premise (Including Air-Gapped Networks or your Homelab), or in a hybrid configuration.Starting Price: $0 Free Community Edition -
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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.
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Kubernetes
Kubernetes
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.Starting Price: Free -
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Run advanced apps on a secured and managed Kubernetes service. GKE is an enterprise-grade platform for containerized applications, including stateful and stateless, AI and ML, Linux and Windows, complex and simple web apps, API, and backend services. Leverage industry-first features like four-way auto-scaling and no-stress management. Optimize GPU and TPU provisioning, use integrated developer tools, and get multi-cluster support from SREs. Start quickly with single-click clusters. Leverage a high-availability control plane including multi-zonal and regional clusters. Eliminate operational overhead with auto-repair, auto-upgrade, and release channels. Secure by default, including vulnerability scanning of container images and data encryption. Integrated Cloud Monitoring with infrastructure, application, and Kubernetes-specific views. Speed up app development without sacrificing security.
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Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat
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.Starting Price: $50.00/month -
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Percona Kubernetes Operator
Percona
The Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster or Percona Server for MongoDB automates the creation, alteration, or deletion of members in your Percona XtraDB Cluster or Percona Server for MongoDB environment. It can be used to instantiate a new Percona XtraDB Cluster or Percona Server for MongoDB replica set, or to scale an existing environment. The Operator contains all necessary Kubernetes settings to provide a proper and consistent Percona XtraDB Cluster or Percona Server for MongoDB instance. The Percona Kubernetes Operators are based on best practices for configuration and setup of a Percona XtraDB Cluster or Percona Server for MongoDB replica set. The benefits of the Operator are many but saving time and delivering a consistent and vetted environment is key.Starting Price: Free -
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Portainer Business
Portainer
Portainer is an intuitive container management platform for Docker, Kubernetes, and Edge-based environments. With a smart UI, Portainer enables you to build, deploy, manage, and secure your containerized environments with ease. It makes container adoption easier for the whole team and reduces time-to-value on Kubernetes and Docker/Swarm. With a simple GUI and a comprehensive API, the product makes it easy for engineers to deploy and manage container-based apps, triage issues, automate CI/CD workflows and set up CaaS (container-as-a-service) environments regardless of hosting environment or K8s distro. Portainer Business is designed to be used in a team environment with multiple users and clusters. The product includes a range of security features, including RBAC, OAuth integration, and logging - making it suitable for use in complex production environments. Portainer also allows you to set up GitOps automation for deployment of your apps to Docker and K8s based on Git repos.Starting Price: Free -
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K8Studio
K8Studio
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.Starting Price: $17 per month -
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Ambassador
Ambassador Labs
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 -
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Virtuozzo
Virtuozzo
Virtuozzo, is a global leader in alternative cloud enablement, providing unique, purpose-built software which enables infrastructure and platform solutions to over 600 service providers around the world. Performance, flexibility, and ease of use define the product line up. Our partners can quickly, cost effectively and profitably create alternative private, public, hybrid or multi-clouds, rivalling those from major cloud providers, but with greater ROI, and customization. Service providers and enterprises can choose between various products and capabilities, using software defined networking, storage and powerful compute management and monitoring. Virtuozzo’s primary products allow for the rapid construction of virtual private servers (VPS), IaaS, PaaS, Storage-as-a-Service, Kubernetes-as-a-Service, WordPress-as-a-Service and Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS). -
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Cloud Foundry
Cloud Foundry
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. -
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Cycle
Cycle.io
Cycle offers a refreshing take on container orchestration, enabling teams to spend more time building and less time managing. Deploy applications seamlessly, gain enhanced visibility, and maintain effortless control, all while reducing complexity and technical debt.Starting Price: Free -
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Loft
Loft Labs
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.Starting Price: $25 per user per month -
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Telepresence
Ambassador Labs
Telepresence streamlines your local development process, enabling immediate feedback. You can launch your local environment on your laptop, equipped with your preferred tools, while Telepresence seamlessly connects them to the microservices and test databases they rely on. It simplifies and expedites collaborative development, debugging, and testing within Kubernetes environments by establishing a seamless connection between your local machine and shared remote Kubernetes clusters. Why Telepresence: Faster feedback loops: Spend less time building, containerizing, and deploying code. Get immediate feedback on code changes by running your service in the cloud from your local machine. Shift testing left: Create a remote-to-local debugging experience. Catch bugs pre-production without the configuration headache of remote debugging. Deliver better, faster user experience: Get new features and applications into the hands of users faster and more frequently.Starting Price: Free -
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Scalingo
Scalingo
Automagic cloud hosting for awesome teams. From prototypes to production-ready applications, Scalingo empowers software teams to manage entire application lifecycles without sysadmin knowledge. Just push your code, your application stack and dependencies are automagically detected and packaged. Instant deployment, instant availability, instant work makes continuous delivery possible. Without DevOps. Start small, grow later, from a prototype to a production-grade infrastructure, instantly, billed by the minute. From 1 to 100 containers in seconds, to handle a peak of traffic or absorb your usual growth, with end-to-end automated processes taking care of continuous deployment. Dedicated resources are allocated for your application. All your containers are isolated from others with security built-in: we take care of OS and software stacks security fixes.Starting Price: €7.20 per month -
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Calico Cloud
Tigera
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.Starting Price: $0.05 per node hour -
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Helm
The Linux Foundation
Helm helps you manage Kubernetes applications, Helm charts help you define, install, and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes application. Charts are easy to create, version, share, and publish, so start using Helm and stop the copy-and-paste. Charts describe even the most complex apps, provide repeatable application installation, and serve as a single point of authority. Take the pain out of updates with in-place upgrades and custom hooks. Charts are easy to version, share, and host on public or private servers. Use helm rollback to roll back to an older version of a release with ease. Helm uses a packaging format called charts. A chart is a collection of files that describe a related set of Kubernetes resources. A single chart might be used to deploy something simple, like a memcached pod, or something complex, like a full web app stack with HTTP servers, databases, caches, and so on.Starting Price: Free -
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Lens
Mirantis
Kubernetes is the OS for the cloud. Thousands of businesses and people develop and operate their Kubernetes on Lens — The largest and most advanced Kubernetes platform in the world. Lens Desktop works with any Kubernetes. It removes complexity and increases productivity. It’s used by everyone — from devs to ops and startups to large companies. Expand functionality with Lens Spaces — a cloud based service. It organizes your existing Kubernetes environments and provides Managed Dev Clusters for your team. Lens is built on open source with vibrant community and is backed by Kubernetes and cloud native ecosystem pioneers. The smart terminal comes with kubectl and helm, automatically syncing the version of kubectl to match the currently selected K8S cluster API version. Lens will automatically assign the kubeconfig context to match the currently selected K8s cluster.Starting Price: $9 per user per month -
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D2iQ
D2iQ
D2iQ Enterprise Kubernetes Platform (DKP) Run Kubernetes Workloads at Scale DKP includes everything you need to ease Kubernetes adoption, expand Kubernetes use, and enable advanced workloads across any infrastructure, whether on-prem, on the cloud, in air-gapped environments, or at the edge. Built to Solve the Toughest Enterprise Kubernetes Challenges Created to accelerate the journey to production at scale, DKP provides a single, centralized point of control to build, run, and manage applications across any infrastructure. Enable Day 2 Readiness Out-of-the-Box Without Lock-In DKP takes care of the heavy lifting by providing a comprehensive, enterprise-grade Kubernetes distribution and a full stack of CNCF-certified Day 2 platform applications that are integrated, automated, and tested at scale for an out-of-the-box, production-ready experience. -
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IronWorker
Iron.io
Container based workloads, full GPU support, autoscaling, custom built solutions. Let Worker take care of your jobs so you can focus on your application. A hosted background job solution that lets you run your containers with dynamic scale, detailed analytics and world class customer support. Run short lived containers quickly, or even containers needing to work across multiple days. Whether it's a one-off job, or one that needs 1000's of workers running in parallel, we've got you covered. Containerize your background tasks with confidence. Run your containers on our shared infrastructure. Dedicated hardware for your workloads. A great option when you need consistent performance and throughput. Our autoscale technology helps you scale up and down based on your usage. You run workers on your own hardware, and we take care of the authentication, scheduling, and everything else. If you have access to your own infrastructure and/or have higher security needs, this is often a great fit.Starting Price: $4.99 per month -
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HashiCorp Nomad
HashiCorp
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. -
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Azure App Service
Microsoft
Quickly build, deploy, and scale web apps and APIs on your terms. Work with .NET, .NET Core, Node.js, Java, Python or PHP, in containers or running on Windows or Linux. Meet rigorous, enterprise-grade performance, security and compliance requirements used a trusted, fully managed platform that handles over 40 billion requests per day. Fully managed platform with built-in infrastructure maintenance, security patching, and scaling. Built-in CI/CD integration and zero-downtime deployments. Rigorous security and compliance, including SOC and PCI, for seamless deployments across public cloud, Azure Government, and on-premises environments. Bring your code or container using the framework language of your choice. Increase developer productivity with tight integration of Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio. Streamline CI/CD with Git, GitHub, GitHub Actions, Atlassian Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, Docker Hub, and Azure Container Registry.Starting Price: $0.013 per hour -
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Triton SmartOS
Joyent
Triton SmartOS combines the capabilities you get from a lightweight container OS, optimized to deliver containers, with the robust security, networking and storage capabilities you’ve come to expect and depend on from a hardware hypervisor. Triton SmartOS leverages Zones, a hardened container runtime environment that does not depend upon VM hosts for security. Patented resource protections insulate containers and ensure that each container gets its fair share of I/O. Triton SmartOS eliminates the complexities associated with VM host dependent solutions. Built-in networking offers each container one or more network interfaces, so each container has a full IP stack and is a full peer on the network, eliminating port conflicts and making network management easy. Secure, isolated, resizable filesystems for each container. The speed of bare metal performance + the flexibility of virtualization.Starting Price: $0.009 per GB per month -
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Scale Computing Platform
Scale Computing
SC//Platform brings faster time to value in the data center, in the distributed enterprise, and at the edge. Scale Computing Platform brings simplicity, high availability and scalability together, replacing the existing infrastructure and providing high availability for running VMs in a single, easy-to-manage platform. Run your applications in a fully integrated platform. Regardless of your hardware requirements, the same innovative software and simple user interface give you the power to run infrastructure efficiently at the edge. Eliminate mundane management tasks and save the valuable time of IT administrators. The simplicity of SC//Platform directly impacts IT with higher productivity and lower costs. Plan the perfect future by not predicting it. Simply mix and match old and new hardware and applications on the same infrastructure for a future-proof environment that can scale up or down as needed. -
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VMware Tanzu Observability
Broadcom
Enterprise observability for all your teams at scale. Most traditional tools detect simple threshold-based anomalies, making it difficult to distinguish false alarms from real issues. With VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront, you create smart alerts that dynamically filter noise and capture true anomalies. Troubleshooting distributed cloud applications is not trivial due to many moving parts, application dependencies, and frequent code updates. Wavefront collects all metrics in one place from your applications, clouds, and infrastructure. Finding a needle in the haystack is not easy when dealing with distributed cloud applications and containerized microservices emitting thousands of metrics. AI Genie™ helps you automatically identify “unknown unknowns” so you can quickly get to root incident root cause – isolate applications, infrastructure, cloud, and edge. -
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Oracle Container Cloud Service (also known as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Container Service Classic) offers Development and Operations teams the benefits of easy and secure Docker containerization when building and deploying applications. Provides an easy-to-use interface to manage the Docker environment. Provides out-of-the-box examples of containerized services and application stacks that can be deployed in one click. Enables developers to easily connect to their private Docker registries (so they can ‘bring their own containers’). Enables developers to focus on building containerized application images and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, not on learning complex orchestration technologies.
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Photon OS
VMware
Project Photon OS™ is an open source, minimal Linux container host that is optimized for cloud-native applications, cloud platforms, and VMware infrastructure. Photon OS 3.0 introduces ARM64 support, installer improvements and updated packages. We invite partners, customers, and community members to collaborate on using Photon OS to run high-performance virtual machines and containerized applications. Contains everything needed to install. Choose between a minimal or a full installation to suit your deployment needs. Photon can be installed from ISO directly, or can be used with PXE/kickstart environments for automated installations. Portable, ready-to-go virtual environment. Photon OS Open Virtual Appliance packages include a highly sanitized and optimized kernel and packages to streamline and standardize appliance deployments. Use Photon OS as a Development Environment for building modern applications. -
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Apache Mesos
Apache Software Foundation
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. -
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Swarm
Docker
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. -
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MicroK8s
Canonical
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.
