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Home , Apache Mesos, Kubernetes, Rancher Labs

List of Leading Distributions By Dmitry Netis & Jordan Rupar / 5.21.2020

Q Advisors assembled a list of prominent Kubernetes software distributions leading the container revolution. A "distribution" is a software bundle that incorporates Kubernetes, as well as container orchestration and management tools. Because Kubernetes is a complex piece of software that is difficult to set up, configure, run and maintain, these distributions offer complete solutions for application hosting and life-cycle management that can be run locally or as a cloud-hosted option.

Company Description

Apache Mesos is a cluster management tool which can manage container orchestration originally created by and released as an open source. It is being used by companies like eBay, Airbnb, etc. Mesos is a competitor to Kubernetes. It can be used to manage physical servers and virtual machines (VMs) running workloads, as well as containers. It has an efficient framework called Marathon for deploying and managing Kubernetes containers on a Mesos cluster.

Canonical has its own Kubernetes distribution, which hails from the makers of Ubuntu , which also runs underneath. The distribution supports both CPU and GPU workloads. Canonical partnered with , which is a container management platform that manages multiple Kubernetes distribution clusters.

CoreOS Tectonic is one of the most prominent Kubernetes distributions advancing container revolution. The CoreOS operating system (formerly ) enables updates to OS that can be slipped into product environments without taking down other running applications. CoreOS was acquired by IBM in early 2019.

Docker is the embodiment of containers. Since 2014, has had its own clustering and orchestration system, Docker Swarm, which, until recently, was a main competitor to Kubernetes. Docker’s fortunes changed quite a bit over the years, from leading the container revolution to becoming somewhat of an afterthought after open-sourced Kubernetes - and the rest of the industry adopted it. In 2017, Docker announced it would be adding Kubernetes with its Docker Enterprise 2.0 platform, acknowledging that Kubernetes is more suitable than Swarm for managing complex container environments. In 2019, Docker Enterprise was sold to . It still has a healthy business with large enterprises, with about a third of Fortune 100 and a fifth of Global 500 companies using Docker Enterprise.

Gravity, a production-hardened Kubernetes distribution, comes from Gravitational, the maker of open source Linux distribution. Gravity is positioned as a private SaaS platform or for running Kubernetes-as-a-service on top of bare metal or multiple cloud providers.

1 Q Advisors - List of Leading Kubernetes Distributions

Company Description

Heptio Kubernetes Subscription (HKS) is a paid support service for enterprises that manages open source Kubernetes configurations and is similar in many ways to Red Hat’s Linux support model. Heptio was founded by the original creators of Kubernetes and acquired by VMware in 2018.

Kontena Pharos distribution is an enterprise-grade management tool which comes with consulting and support services, much like Red Hat’s Linux offering. The paid version of the Kubernetes management platform includes a dashboard, distributed storage system, backup, and load balancing, among other features.

Pivotal offers an enterprise-grade Kubenetes framework called Pivotal Container Service (PKS), which closely integrates with the VMware environments. In fact, PKS is a joint VMware-Pivotal project. Its Kubo project is used in Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry to launch and manage Kubernetes clusters.

Rancher Labs has incorporated Kubernetes into its container management platform. Rancher 2.0 is a new Kubernetes distribution sitting atop Linux hosts, Docker containers, and Kubernetes nodes, orchestrating all those clusters. It is capable of orchestrating cloud native infrastructure from Amazon EKS (Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes), Google (Kubernetes Engine), Azure (Kubernetes Service), and other clouds.

Red Hat OpenShift is a platform-as-a-service offering, originally using Heroku to package applications into containers. It later standardized on Docker for container images and runtime standard and adopted Kubernetes as an orchestration tool. The abstraction and automation layer in OpenShift is used to alleviate a fair amount of administrative burden when deploying Kubernetes.

SUSE distribution uses containers-as-a-service platform (SUSE CaaS Platform). It is best known for its Linux distribution, which became popular in Europe. SUSE combines a bare-metal micro OS that runs containers, Kubernetes for container orchestration, a built-in image registry, and cluster configuration tools in one distribution package. SUSE CaaS Platform allows containers to be run across multiple clouds and bare metal data centers.

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