Best Container Orchestration Software for Cloud
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Compare the Top Container Orchestration Software for Cloud as of June 2025
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What is Container Orchestration Software for Cloud?
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 Cloud currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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1
Google Cloud Run
Google
Google Cloud Run abstracts away the complexity of container orchestration, allowing developers to deploy applications without having to configure and manage Kubernetes clusters. While Cloud Run itself handles the orchestration of containers, it offers compatibility with Kubernetes for users who wish to leverage more granular control and customization. Cloud Run’s automatic scaling and load balancing ensure that containerized applications scale efficiently based on traffic, making it an excellent choice for developers looking for a streamlined experience. New customers can use the $300 in free credits to explore how Cloud Run can handle container orchestration automatically, without the need for manual intervention. This reduces operational complexity and eliminates the need for users to manage orchestration tools themselves. Cloud Run’s serverless architecture enables it to efficiently handle both simple and complex containerized applications at any scale.Starting Price: Free (2 mil requests/month) -
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Google Cloud Platform
Google
Google Cloud Platform offers Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), a fully managed service for container orchestration. GKE simplifies the management of Kubernetes clusters, automating tasks such as scaling, load balancing, and rolling updates. With the $300 in free credits for new customers, users can run, test, and deploy containerized applications on GCP to understand how container orchestration works, all while minimizing initial costs. The service also integrates seamlessly with GCP’s monitoring and logging tools, providing deep insights into the health and performance of applications. Additionally, GKE supports multi-cluster management, making it easy for organizations to deploy containerized applications across multiple regions. This orchestration service is ideal for businesses that want to scale their containerized applications globally without compromising reliability or security.Starting Price: Free ($300 in free credits) -
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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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5
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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7
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 -
8
Pliant
Pliant.io
Pliant’s solution for IT Process Automation simplifies, streamlines, and secures how teams build and deploy automation. Reduce human error, ensure compliance, and elevate your efficiency, with Pliant. Ingest existing automation and write new automation with single-pane orchestration. Ensure compliance using consistent, practical built-in governance. Pliant has abstracted thousands of vendor APIs to create intelligent action blocks allowing users to drag-and-drop blocks, rather than writing and rewriting lines of code. From a single platform, citizen developers are able to build consistent and meaningful automation across platforms, services, and applications in minutes — maximizing value across the entire technology stack in one place. With our ability to add new APIs in 15 business days, anything that is not already out of the box will be in an industry leading timeframe. -
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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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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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Stakkr
Python Software Foundation
Stakkr is a a docker recompose tool that uses docker compose to easily create / maintain a stack of services, for example for web development. Via a configuration file you can setup the required services and let stakkr link and start everything for you. It works only in CLI and it’s a good replacement to Vagrant. If you have heard of Docker, you know that when you need to build a full environment with multiple services that are linked, you either have to do everything manually or use docker-compose. The second solution is the best but it implies that you need, for each environment, to change your parameters, choose your images, learn the docker-compose command line tool, etc. In brief, it’s not very flexible and hard to learn. Stakkr will help you, via a very simple configuration file and a predefined list of services (that can be extended by plugins) to build a complete environment. Plus, to control it in command line. It makes use of docker easy. -
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VNS3
Cohesive Networks
The all-in-one networking device promising connectivity, security and flexibility at a fraction of the cost. Launch a VNS3 image through a public cloud marketplace. We are available in AWS, Azure and GCP. Via private image sharing. We will gladly share a private image with your account. We can also provide a VDI/VDK file which you can import into your environment of choice, be that VMWare or a locked down cloud environment. The Cohesive Networks support team will provide you a license in minutes. Upgrading your VNS3 controller's license can be done via the VNS3 console or the API. The VNS3 Overlay Network is an optional feature that provides end-to-end encryption, increased performance (in most cloud environments), and IP address mobility across regions and cloud providers. An overlay network is layered over the native networking layers, but can be independent from all underlying hardware and software. The overlay is dependent on the native networking layers.Starting Price: $150 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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Strong Network
Strong Network
Strong Network allows the management of containers for DevOps online (as opposed to locally on developers laptop) and access them through a cloud IDE or a SSH connection (in the case of a local IDE). These containers provide a complete management of access keys and credentials to multiple types of resources, in addition to providing data loss prevention (DLP). In addition we combine the IDE with a secure chrome browser (remote browser isolation) such that any third party applications for DevOps can be accessed with DLP. This platform is a complete replacement for VDI/DaaS for code development. Our platform allows the provisioning and management of containers for development online (as opposed to locally on developers' laptops, using a solution like docker desktop for example) and enables accessing them through a cloud IDE or a SSH connection (in the case of a local IDE).Starting Price: $39 -
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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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IONOS Compute Engine
IONOS
The IONOS Compute Engine is a flexible Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform that offers scalable cloud computing resources tailored to diverse business needs. Users can configure virtual data centers with precise allocations of CPU cores, RAM, and storage, adjusting resources dynamically—even during operation—to match workload demands. The platform provides two server types: cost-effective vCPU servers suitable for general workloads, and Dedicated Core servers that deliver consistent performance with dedicated physical cores, ideal for resource-intensive applications. With a user-friendly Data Center Designer interface, businesses can design and manage their cloud infrastructure efficiently. The Compute Engine's transparent, usage-based pricing ensures cost control, making it a compelling choice for organizations seeking customizable and reliable cloud solutions.Starting Price: $0.0071 per hour -
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harpoon
harpoon
harpoon is a drag-and-drop Kubernetes tool for deploying any software in seconds. Whether you're new to Kubernetes or are looking for the best way to learn, harpoon has all the features you need to be successful in deploying and configuring your software using the industry-leading container orchestrator, all with no code. Our visual Kubernetes interface enables anyone to deploy production-grade software with no code. Easily accomplish simple or complex enterprise-grade cloud deployments to deploy and configure software and autoscale Kubernetes without writing any code or configuration scripts. Instantly search for and find any piece of commercial or open source software on the planet and deploy it to the cloud with one click. Before running any applications or services, harpoon will run automated scripts that will secure your cloud provider account. Connect harpoon to your source code repository anywhere and set up an automated deployment pipeline.Starting Price: $50 per month -
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mogenius
mogenius
mogenius combines visibility, observability, and automation in a single platform for comprehensive Kubernetes control. Connect and visualize your Kubernetes clusters and workloads. Provide visibility for the entire team. Identify misconfigurations across your workloads. Take action directly within the mogenius platform. Automate your K8s operations with service catalogs, developer self-service, and ephemeral environments. Leverage developer self-service to simplify deployments for your developers. Optimize resource allocation and avoid configuration drift through standardized and automated workflows. Eliminate duplicate work and encourage reusability with service catalogs. Get full visibility into your current Kubernetes setup. Deploy a cloud-agnostic Kubernetes operator to receive a complete overview of what’s going on across your clusters and workloads. Provide developers with local and ephemeral testing environments in a few clicks that mirror your production setup.Starting Price: $350 per month -
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Northflank
Northflank
The self-service developer platform for your apps, databases, and jobs. Start with one workload, and scale to hundreds on compute or GPUs. Accelerate every step from push to production with highly configurable self-service workflows, pipelines, templates, and GitOps. Securely deploy preview, staging, and production environments with observability tooling, backups, restores, and rollbacks included. Northflank seamlessly integrates with your preferred tooling and can accommodate any tech stack. Whether you deploy on Northflank’s secure infrastructure or on your own cloud account, you get the same exceptional developer experience, and total control over your data residency, deployment regions, security, and cloud expenses. Northflank leverages Kubernetes as an operating system to give you the best of cloud-native, without the overhead. Deploy to Northflank’s cloud for maximum simplicity, or connect your GKE, EKS, AKS, or bare-metal to deliver a managed platform experience in minutes.Starting Price: $6 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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IBM Cloud® Kubernetes Service is a certified, managed Kubernetes solution, built for creating a cluster of compute hosts to deploy and manage containerized apps on IBM Cloud®. It provides intelligent scheduling, self-healing, horizontal scaling and securely manages the resources that you need to quickly deploy, update and scale applications. IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service manages the master, freeing you from having to manage the host OS, container runtime and Kubernetes version-update process.Starting Price: $0.11 per hour
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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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Google Cloud Build
Google
Fully serverless platform. Cloud Build scales up and scales down in response to load with no need to pre-provision servers or pay in advance for additional capacity. Pay only for what you use. With custom build steps and pre-created extensions to third party apps, enterprises can easily tie their legacy or home-grown tools as a part of their build process. Guard against security threats in your software supply chain with vulnerability scanning. Automatically block the deployment of vulnerable images based on policies set by DevSecOps. Cloud Build scales up and down with no infrastructure to set up, upgrade, or scale. Run builds in a fully managed environment across Google Cloud, on-premises, other public clouds, or your own private network. Create portable images directly from the source without a Dockerfile using buildpacks. Support for Tekton pipelines running on Kubernetes gives you scale and self-healing benefits of Kubernetes, without lock-in. -
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Azure Container Instances
Microsoft
Develop apps fast without managing virtual machines or having to learn new tools—it's just your application, in a container, running in the cloud. By running your workloads in Azure Container Instances (ACI), you can focus on designing and building your applications instead of managing the infrastructure that runs them. Deploy containers to the cloud with unprecedented simplicity and speed—with a single command. Use ACI to provision additional compute for demanding workloads whenever you need. For example, with the Virtual Kubelet, use ACI to elastically burst from your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster when traffic comes in spikes. Gain the security of virtual machines for your container workloads, while preserving the efficiency of lightweight containers. ACI provides hypervisor isolation for each container group to ensure containers run in isolation without sharing a kernel. -
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Aptible
Aptible
Aptible automatically implements the security controls you need to achieve regulatory compliance and pass customer audits. Out-of-the-box compliance. Aptible Deploy enables you to meet and maintain regulatory compliance and customer audit requirements automatically. Aptible provides everything you need to meet encryption requirements so your Databases, traffic, and certificates are secure. You get automatic backups of your data every 24 hours. You can trigger a manual backup at any time, and restore in a few clicks. Logs are generated and backed up for every deploy, config change, database tunnel, and console operation, and session. Aptible monitors the underlying EC2 instances in your stacks for potential intrusions, such as unauthorized SSH access, rootkits, file integrity issues, and privilege escalation. The Aptible Security Team responds on your behalf 24/7 to investigate and resolve issues as they arise. -
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Nebula Container Orchestrator
Nebula Container Orchestrator
Nebula container orchestrator aims to help devs and ops treat IoT devices just like distributed Dockerized apps. It aim is to act as Docker orchestrator for IoT devices as well as for distributed services such as CDN or edge computing that can span thousands (possibly even millions) of devices worldwide and it does it all while being open-source and completely free. Nebula is a open source project created for Docker orchestration and designed to manage massive clusters at scale, it achieves this by scaling each project component out as far as required. The project’s aim is to act as Docker orchestrator for IoT devices as well as for distributed services such as CDN or edge computing. Nebula is capable of simultaneously updating tens of thousands of IoT devices worldwide with a single API call in an effort to help devs and ops treat IoT devices just like distributed Dockerized apps. -
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Marathon
D2iQ
Marathon is a production-grade container orchestration platform for Mesosphere’s Datacenter Operating System (DC/OS) and Apache Mesos. High Availability. Marathon runs as an active/passive cluster with leader election for 100% uptime. Multiple container runtimes. Marathon has first-class support for both Mesos containers (using cgroups) and Docker. Stateful apps. Marathon can bind persistent storage volumes to your application. You can run databases like MySQL and Postgres, and have storage accounted for by Mesos. Beautiful and powerful UI. Service Discovery & Load Balancing. Several methods available. Health Checks. Evaluate your application’s health using HTTP or TCP checks. Event Subscription. Supply an HTTP endpoint to receive notifications - for example to integrate with an external load balancer. Metrics. Query them at /metrics in JSON format, push them to systems like Graphite, StatsD and DataDog, or scrape them using Prometheus.
