Top 5 Container Cluster Managers: Containers and Cloud Management

photo by OneEighteen	via PhotoRee

The rapid ascent of containers is nothing less than breathtaking. In the space of a year and a half, Docker has went from initial release to being adopted by every major IaaS cloud host (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Rackspace's On-Metal CoreOS), VM software vendor, and a few toolchain developers. As a point of reference, VMWare ESX took over 5 years before ever getting near such market penetration. It is interesting to consider at this point what the management tool options are for containers and clusters/networks of containers. There are two main categories of use cases for Docker: devops (e.g., continuous integration) and virtualization infrastructure (e.g., improve utilization of server resources using lightweight containers in place of hypervisor-based virtualization).

This is a series of evaluations of container cluster managers: Part 2 (Kubernetes and Decking) and Part 3 (Flocker).

• Google announced Kubernetes a few months ago, which works on Microsoft Azure and has the backing of Red Hat OpenShift. Kubernetes is more of a general-purpose cluster manager geared towards large cluster orchestration and management.
• ClusterHQ has Flocker. Flocker is positioned to deploy clusters of containerized data stores but can host general apps.
• Flynn aims to be a drop-in auto-scaling PaaS solution built on top of Docker.
• Shipyard is built on top of the Citadel Toolkit which provides cluster scheduling of containers.
• Amazon announced (but has not released yet) EC2 Container Service but it is a service rather than a standalone solution that can function on any cloud host or even your own private cloud or network.

Please check back for a series of evaluations of Kubernetes and these other container cluster managers: Part 2 (Kubernetes and Decking) and Part 3 (Flocker).

Besides the Docker-container-specific solutions, both Apache Mesos and Hadoop YARN, what Google's paper on Omega terms "two-level schedulers", now support Docker containers. Deis is a tool leveraging CoreOS fleet and etcd for cluster management.