Best Container Orchestration Software for Linux
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Compare the Top Container Orchestration Software for Linux as of May 2025
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What is Container Orchestration Software for Linux?
Container orchestration software is a platform that automates the deployment, management, scaling, and networking of containers in a distributed environment. These tools help manage the complexities of containerized applications by ensuring containers are running efficiently, scaled appropriately, and able to communicate with each other. The most popular container orchestration software uses tools like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, or Apache Mesos, providing features such as load balancing, automated container provisioning, self-healing, and monitoring. These tools are essential for managing large-scale containerized applications and microservices, ensuring high availability, performance, and resilience. Compare and read user reviews of the best Container Orchestration software for Linux currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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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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Appvia Wayfinder
Appvia
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.Starting Price: $0.035 US per vcpu per hour -
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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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SaltStack
SaltStack
SaltStack is an intelligent IT automation platform that can manage, secure, and optimize any infrastructure—on-prem, in the cloud, or at the edge. It’s built on a unique and powerful event-driven automation engine that detects events in any system and reacts intelligently to them, making it an extremely effective solution for managing large, complex environments. With the newly launched SecOps offering, SaltStack can detect security vulnerabilities and non-compliant, mis-configured systems. As soon as an issue is detected, this powerful automation helps you and your team remediate it, keeping your infrastructure securely configured, compliant, and up-to-date. The SecOps suite includes both Comply and Protect. Comply scans and remediates against CIS, DISA-STIG, NIST, PCI, HIPAA compliance standards. And Protect scans for vulnerabilities and patches and updates your operating systems. -
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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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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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Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Systems
Bacula Enterprise delivers Physical, Virtual, Container and Hybrid Cloud Backup & Recovery software for the Modern Data Center - all from a single platform. Designed for medium and large organizations, Bacula Enterprise backup and recovery software brings unique innovation, modern architecture, business value benefits and low cost of ownership. Bacula Enterprise corporate data backup software solution uses exclusive technologies that increase the interoperability, power, flexibility and functionality of Bacula Enterprise into a wide range of IT environments such as enterprise data centers, managed service providers, software vendors or cloud providers. Thousands of organizations worldwide use Bacula Enterprise in mission-critical environments, including NASA, Texas A&M University, Unicredit, Swisscom, Sky, and many more. Bacula provides additional security features over other vendors and offers advanced, hybrid Cloud connectivity to Amazon, S3, Google, Oracle and many more. -
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JFrog Pipelines
JFrog
JFrog Pipelines empowers software teams to ship updates faster by automating DevOps processes in a continuously streamlined and secure way across all their teams and tools. Encompassing continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), infrastructure and more, it automates everything from code to production. Pipelines is natively integrated with the JFrog Platform and is available with both cloud (software-as-a-service) and on-prem subscriptions. Scales horizontally, allowing you to have a centrally managed solution that supports thousands of users and pipelines in a high-availability (HA) environment. Pre-packaged declarative steps with no scripting required, making it easy to create complex pipelines, including cross-team “pipelines of pipelines.” Integrates with most DevOps tools. The steps in a single pipeline can run on multi-OS, multi-architecture nodes, reducing the need to have multiple CI/CD tools.Starting Price: $98/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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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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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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Mirantis Kubernetes Engine
Mirantis
Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (formerly Docker Enterprise) provides simple, flexible, and scalable container orchestration and enterprise container management. Use Kubernetes, Swarm, or both, and experience the fastest time to production for modern applications across any environment. Enterprise container orchestration Avoid lock-in. Run Mirantis Kubernetes Engine on bare metal, or on private or public clouds—and on a range of popular Linux distributions. Reduce time-to-value. Hit the ground running with out-of-the-box dependencies including Calico for Kubernetes networking and NGINX for Ingress support. Leverage open source. Save money and maintain control by using a full stack of open source-based technologies that are production-proven, scalable, and extensible. Focus on apps—not infrastructure. Enable your IT team to focus on building business-differentiating applications when you couple Mirantis Kubernetes Engine with OpsCare Plus for a fully-managed K8s experience. -
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Helios
Spotify
Helios is a Docker orchestration platform for deploying and managing containers across an entire fleet of servers. Helios provides a HTTP API as well as a command-line client to interact with servers running your containers. It also keeps a history of events in your cluster including information such as deploys, restarts and version changes. The binary release of Helios is built for Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, but Helios should be buildable on any platform with at least Java 8 and a recent Maven 3 available. Use helios-solo to launch a local environment with a Helios master and agent. Helios is pragmatic. We're not trying to solve everything today, but what we have, we try hard to ensure is rock-solid. So we don't have things like resource limits or dynamic scheduling yet. Today, for us, it has been more important to get the CI/CD use cases, and surrounding tooling solid first. That said, we eventually want to do dynamic scheduling, composite jobs, etc. -
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Nextflow
Seqera Labs
Data-driven computational pipelines. Nextflow enables scalable and reproducible scientific workflows using software containers. It allows the adaptation of pipelines written in the most common scripting languages. Its fluent DSL simplifies the implementation and deployment of complex parallel and reactive workflows on clouds and clusters. Nextflow is built around the idea that Linux is the lingua franca of data science. Nextflow allows you to write a computational pipeline by making it simpler to put together many different tasks. You may reuse your existing scripts and tools and you don't need to learn a new language or API to start using it. Nextflow supports Docker and Singularity containers technology. This, along with the integration of the GitHub code-sharing platform, allows you to write self-contained pipelines, manage versions, and rapidly reproduce any former configuration. Nextflow provides an abstraction layer between your pipeline's logic and the execution layer.Starting Price: Free -
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k0s
Mirantis
k0s is the simple, solid & certified Kubernetes distribution that works on any infrastructure: bare-metal, on-premises, edge, IoT, public & private clouds. It's 100% open source & free. Zero Friction - k0s drastically reduces the complexity of installing and running a fully conformant Kubernetes distribution. New kube clusters can be bootstrapped in minutes. Developer friction is reduced to zero, allowing anyone, with no special skills or expertise in Kubernetes to easily get started. Zero Deps - k0s is distributed as a single binary with zero host OS dependencies besides the host OS kernel. It works with any operating system without additional software packages or configuration. Any security vulnerabilities or performance issues can be fixed directly in the k0s distribution. Zero Cost - k0s is completely free for personal or commercial use, and it always will be. The source code is available on GitHub under Apache 2 license.Starting Price: $0 -
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OneCloud
OneCloud
OneCloud had its roots in the vibrant city of Rotterdam, known for its innovation, where developers faced all sorts of hurdles when building web applications in traditional hosting and cloud setups. Our journey started with a strong desire to change and improve the way cloud development works. At OneCloud, our mission is to empower developers with a state-of-the-art Kubernetes cloud platform, giving them the tools to regain control over their web application development. Our goal is to eliminate obstacles and make the process easier, so developers can concentrate on innovation and creativity. With OneCloud, you're not just getting a cloud platform; you're gaining a reliable tech partner and an extended team you can truly rely on. We welcome you to join us as we reshape the cloud development scene, harnessing the potential of the Cloud and revolutionizing the process of building and deploying web applications.Starting Price: $0 -
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Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Microsoft
The fully managed Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) makes deploying and managing containerized applications easy. It offers serverless Kubernetes, an integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience, and enterprise-grade security and governance. Unite your development and operations teams on a single platform to rapidly build, deliver, and scale applications with confidence. Elastic provisioning of additional capacity without the need to manage the infrastructure. Add event-driven autoscaling and triggers through KEDA. Faster end-to-end development experience with Azure Dev Spaces including integration with Visual Studio Code Kubernetes tools, Azure DevOps, and Azure Monitor. Advanced identity and access management using Azure Active Directory, and dynamic rules enforcement across multiple clusters with Azure Policy. Available in more regions than any other cloud providers. -
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Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) from Alibaba Cloud is a fully managed service. ACK is integrated with services such as virtualization, storage, network and security, providing user a high performance and scalable Kubernetes environments for containerized applications. Alibaba Cloud is a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP) and ACK is certified by Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program which ensures consistent experience of Kubernetes and workload portability. Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP) and qualified by Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program. Ensures Kubernetes consistent experience, workload portability. Provides deep and rich enterprise-class cloud native abilities. Ensures end-to-end application security and provides fine-grained access control. Allows you to quickly create Kubernetes clusters. Provides container-based management of applications throughout the application lifecycle.
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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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Apache Brooklyn
Apache Software Foundation
Your applications, any clouds, any containers, anywhere. Apache Brooklyn is software for managing cloud applications. Use it for: Blueprints describe your application, stored as text files in version control, components configured & integrated across multiple machines automatically, 20+ public clouds, or your private cloud or bare servers - and Docker containers, monitor key application metrics; scale to meet demand; restart and replace failed components. View and modify using the web console or automate using the REST API. -
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Apache Helix
Apache Software Foundation
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. -
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Test Kitchen
KitchenCI
Test Kitchen provides a test harness to execute infrastructure code on one or more platforms in isolation. A driver plugin architecture is used to run code on various cloud providers and virtualization technologies such as Vagrant, Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, Docker, and more. Many testing frameworks are supported out of the box including Chef InSpec, Serverspec, and Bats For Chef Infra workflows, cookbook dependency resolution via Berkshelf or Policyfiles is supported or include a cookbooks/ directory and Kitchen will know what to do. Test Kitchen is used by all Chef-managed community cookbooks and is the integration testing tool of choice for cookbooks. -
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azk
Azuki
What’s so great about azk? azk is open source software (Apache 2.0) and will always be. azk is agnostic and has a very soft learning curve. Keep using the exact same development tools you already use. It only takes a few commands. Minutes instead of hours or days. azk does its magic by executing very short and simple recipe files (Azkfile.js) that describe the environments to be installed and configured. azk is fast and your machine will barely feel it. It uses containers instead of virtual machines. Containers are like virtual machines, only with better performance and lower consumption of physical resources. azk is built with Docker, the best open source engine for managing containers. Sharing an Azkfile.js assures total parity among development environments in different programmers' machines and reduces the chances of bugs during deployment. Not sure if all the programmers in your team are using the updated version of the development environment? -
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Apache Aurora
Apache Software Foundation
Aurora runs applications and services across a shared pool of machines, and is responsible for keeping them running, forever. When machines experience failure, Aurora intelligently reschedules those jobs onto healthy machines. When updating a job, Aurora will detect the health and status of a deployment and automatically rollback if necessary. Aurora has a quota system to provide guaranteed resources for specific applications, and can support multiple users to deploy services. Services are highly-configurable via a DSL which supports templating, allowing you to establish common patterns and avoid redundant configurations. Aurora announces services to Apache ZooKeeper for discovery by clients like Finagle. -
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Canonical Juju
Canonical
Better operators for enterprise apps with a full application graph and declarative integration for both Kubernetes and legacy estate. Juju operator integration allows us to keep each operator as simple as possible, then compose them to create rich application graph topologies that support complex scenarios with a simple, consistent experience and much less YAML. The UNIX philosophy of ‘doing one thing well’ applies to large-scale operations code too, and the benefits of clarity and reuse are exactly the same. Small is beautiful. Juju allows you to adopt the operator pattern for your entire estate, including legacy apps. Model-driven operations dramatically reduce maintenance and operations costs for traditional workloads without re-platforming to K8s. Once charmed, legacy apps become multi-cloud ready, too. The Juju Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) uniquely supports both container and machine-based apps, with seamless integration between them.
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