Alternatives to RancherOS logo

Alternatives to RancherOS

CoreOS, Rancher, Ubuntu, Kubernetes, and Portainer are the most popular alternatives and competitors to RancherOS.
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What is RancherOS and what are its top alternatives?

It makes it simple to run containers at scale in development, test and production. By containerizing system services and leveraging Docker for management, the operating system provides a very reliable and easy to manage containers.
RancherOS is a tool in the Operating Systems category of a tech stack.
RancherOS is an open source tool with 6.4K GitHub stars and 657 GitHub forks. Here’s a link to RancherOS's open source repository on GitHub

Top Alternatives to RancherOS

  • CoreOS
    CoreOS

    It is designed for security, consistency, and reliability. Instead of installing packages via yum or apt, it uses Linux containers to manage your services at a higher level of abstraction. A single service's code and all dependencies are packaged within a container that can be run on one or many machines. ...

  • Rancher
    Rancher

    Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform. ...

  • Ubuntu
    Ubuntu

    Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning ‘humanity to others’. It also means ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computers. ...

  • Kubernetes
    Kubernetes

    Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions. ...

  • Portainer
    Portainer

    It is a universal container management tool. It works with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm and Azure ACI. It allows you to manage containers without needing to know platform-specific code. ...

  • Debian
    Debian

    Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel or the FreeBSD kernel. Linux is a piece of software started by Linus Torvalds and supported by thousands of programmers worldwide. FreeBSD is an operating system including a kernel and other software. ...

  • k3s
    k3s

    Certified Kubernetes distribution designed for production workloads in unattended, resource-constrained, remote locations or inside IoT appliances. Supports something as small as a Raspberry Pi or as large as an AWS a1.4xlarge 32GiB server. ...

  • Docker Compose
    Docker Compose

    With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running. ...

RancherOS alternatives & related posts

CoreOS logo

CoreOS

224
294
44
Linux for Massive Server Deployments
224
294
+ 1
44
PROS OF COREOS
  • 20
    Container management
  • 15
    Lightweight
  • 9
    Systemd
CONS OF COREOS
  • 3
    End-of-lifed

related CoreOS posts

Rancher logo

Rancher

942
1.5K
644
Open Source Platform for Running a Private Container Service
942
1.5K
+ 1
644
PROS OF RANCHER
  • 103
    Easy to use
  • 79
    Open source and totally free
  • 63
    Multi-host docker-compose support
  • 58
    Load balancing and health check included
  • 58
    Simple
  • 44
    Rolling upgrades, green/blue upgrades feature
  • 42
    Dns and service discovery out-of-the-box
  • 37
    Only requires docker
  • 34
    Multitenant and permission management
  • 29
    Easy to use and feature rich
  • 11
    Cross cloud compatible
  • 11
    Does everything needed for a docker infrastructure
  • 8
    Simple and powerful
  • 8
    Next-gen platform
  • 7
    Very Docker-friendly
  • 6
    Support Kubernetes and Swarm
  • 6
    Application catalogs with stack templates (wizards)
  • 6
    Supports Apache Mesos, Docker Swarm, and Kubernetes
  • 6
    Rolling and blue/green upgrades deployments
  • 6
    High Availability service: keeps your app up 24/7
  • 5
    Easy to use service catalog
  • 4
    Very intuitive UI
  • 4
    IaaS-vendor independent, supports hybrid/multi-cloud
  • 4
    Awesome support
  • 3
    Scalable
  • 2
    Requires less infrastructure requirements
CONS OF RANCHER
  • 10
    Hosting Rancher can be complicated

related Rancher posts

Ubuntu logo

Ubuntu

76.8K
56.5K
468
The leading OS for PC, tablet, phone and cloud
76.8K
56.5K
+ 1
468
PROS OF UBUNTU
  • 230
    Free to use
  • 96
    Easy setup for testing discord bot
  • 57
    Gateway Linux Distro
  • 54
    Simple interface
  • 9
    Don't need driver installation in most cases
  • 6
    Open Source
  • 6
    Many active communities
  • 3
    Software Availability
  • 3
    Easy to custom
  • 2
    Many flavors/distros based on ubuntu
  • 1
    Lightweight container base OS
  • 1
    Great OotB Linux Shell Experience
CONS OF UBUNTU
  • 5
    Demanding system requirements
  • 4
    Adds overhead and unnecessary complexity over Debian
  • 2
    Snapd installed by default
  • 1
    Systemd

related Ubuntu posts

Tim Abbott
Shared insights
on
DebianDebianUbuntuUbuntuFedoraFedora
at

We use Debian and its derivative Ubuntu because the apt ecosystem and toolchain for Debian packages is far superior to the yum-based system used by Fedora and RHEL. This is large part due to a huge amount of investment into tools like debhelper/dh over the years by the Debian community. I haven't dealt with RPM in the last couple years, but every experience I've had with RPM is that the RPM tools are slower, have less useful options, and it's more work to package software for them (and one makes more compromises in doing so).

I think everyone has seen the better experience using Ubuntu in the shift of prevalence from RHEL to Ubuntu in what most new companies are deploying on their servers, and I expect that trend to continue as long as Red Hat is using the RPM system (and I don't really see them as having a path to migrate).

The experience with Ubuntu and Debian stable releases is pretty similar: A solid release every 2 years that's supported for a few years. (While Ubuntu in theory releases every 6 months, their non-LTS releases are effectively betas: They're often unstable, only have 9 months of support, etc. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone not actively participating in Ubuntu the development community). Ubuntu has better integration of non-free drivers, which may be important if you have hardware that requires them. But it's also the case that most bugs I experience when using Ubuntu are Ubuntu-specific issues, especially on servers (in part because Ubuntu has a bunch of "cloud management" stuff pre-installed that is definitely a regression if you're not using Canonical's cloud management products).

See more
John Calandra
Data Manager at The Garrett Group · | 8 upvotes · 354.4K views

There is a question coming... I am using Oracle VirtualBox to spawn 3 Ubuntu Linux virtual machines (VM). VM1 is being used as a data lake - just a place to store flat files. VM2 hosts Apache NiFi. VM3 hosts PostgreSQL. I have built a NiFi pipeline that reads flat files on VM1 and then pipes the data over to and inserts it into the Postgresql database. I left this setup alone for a while, and then something hiccupped on VM3, and I had to rebuild it. Now I cannot make a remote connection to Postgresql on VM3. I was using pgAdmin3 on VM3, but it kept throwing errors - I found out it went end-of-life in 2018 and uninstalled it. pgAdmin4 is out, but for some reason, I cannot get the APT utility to find/install it. I am trying to figure out the pgAdmin4 install problem and looking for a good alternative for pgAdmin4 that I can use to diagnose the remote database connection problem. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

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Kubernetes logo

Kubernetes

58.2K
50.4K
677
Manage a cluster of Linux containers as a single system to accelerate Dev and simplify Ops
58.2K
50.4K
+ 1
677
PROS OF KUBERNETES
  • 164
    Leading docker container management solution
  • 128
    Simple and powerful
  • 106
    Open source
  • 76
    Backed by google
  • 58
    The right abstractions
  • 25
    Scale services
  • 20
    Replication controller
  • 11
    Permission managment
  • 9
    Supports autoscaling
  • 8
    Cheap
  • 8
    Simple
  • 6
    Self-healing
  • 5
    No cloud platform lock-in
  • 5
    Promotes modern/good infrascture practice
  • 5
    Open, powerful, stable
  • 5
    Reliable
  • 4
    Scalable
  • 4
    Quick cloud setup
  • 3
    Cloud Agnostic
  • 3
    Captain of Container Ship
  • 3
    A self healing environment with rich metadata
  • 3
    Runs on azure
  • 3
    Backed by Red Hat
  • 3
    Custom and extensibility
  • 2
    Sfg
  • 2
    Gke
  • 2
    Everything of CaaS
  • 2
    Golang
  • 2
    Easy setup
  • 2
    Expandable
CONS OF KUBERNETES
  • 16
    Steep learning curve
  • 15
    Poor workflow for development
  • 8
    Orchestrates only infrastructure
  • 4
    High resource requirements for on-prem clusters
  • 2
    Too heavy for simple systems
  • 1
    Additional vendor lock-in (Docker)
  • 1
    More moving parts to secure
  • 1
    Additional Technology Overhead

related Kubernetes posts

Conor Myhrvold
Tech Brand Mgr, Office of CTO at Uber · | 44 upvotes · 9.5M views

How Uber developed the open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Jaeger , now a CNCF project:

Distributed tracing is quickly becoming a must-have component in the tools that organizations use to monitor their complex, microservice-based architectures. At Uber, our open source distributed tracing system Jaeger saw large-scale internal adoption throughout 2016, integrated into hundreds of microservices and now recording thousands of traces every second.

Here is the story of how we got here, from investigating off-the-shelf solutions like Zipkin, to why we switched from pull to push architecture, and how distributed tracing will continue to evolve:

https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/

(GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)

Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark

See more
Yshay Yaacobi

Our first experience with .NET core was when we developed our OSS feature management platform - Tweek (https://github.com/soluto/tweek). We wanted to create a solution that is able to run anywhere (super important for OSS), has excellent performance characteristics and can fit in a multi-container architecture. We decided to implement our rule engine processor in F# , our main service was implemented in C# and other components were built using JavaScript / TypeScript and Go.

Visual Studio Code worked really well for us as well, it worked well with all our polyglot services and the .Net core integration had great cross-platform developer experience (to be fair, F# was a bit trickier) - actually, each of our team members used a different OS (Ubuntu, macos, windows). Our production deployment ran for a time on Docker Swarm until we've decided to adopt Kubernetes with almost seamless migration process.

After our positive experience of running .Net core workloads in containers and developing Tweek's .Net services on non-windows machines, C# had gained back some of its popularity (originally lost to Node.js), and other teams have been using it for developing microservices, k8s sidecars (like https://github.com/Soluto/airbag), cli tools, serverless functions and other projects...

See more
Portainer logo

Portainer

482
817
144
Open source tool for managing containerized applications
482
817
+ 1
144
PROS OF PORTAINER
  • 35
    Simple
  • 26
    Great UI
  • 19
    Friendly
  • 12
    Easy to setup, gives a practical interface for Docker
  • 11
    Because it just works, super simple yet powerful
  • 11
    Fully featured
  • 9
    A must for Docker DevOps
  • 7
    Free and opensource
  • 5
    It's simple, fast and the support is great
  • 5
    API
  • 4
    Template Support
CONS OF PORTAINER
    Be the first to leave a con

    related Portainer posts

    Wallace Alves
    Cyber Security Analyst · | 2 upvotes · 855.1K views

    Docker Docker Compose Portainer ELK Elasticsearch Kibana Logstash nginx

    See more
    Charles Coleman
    President/CEO at Rapidfyre · | 2 upvotes · 280K views
    Shared insights
    on
    PortainerPortainerDockerDocker

    I've found Portainer to be a like the 8 tooled jacknife I need for Docker and am loving it. Wasn't hard to get up and going and is well rounded enough to do everything I need. Win win.

    See more
    Debian logo

    Debian

    15.6K
    10.8K
    164
    The Universal Operating System
    15.6K
    10.8K
    + 1
    164
    PROS OF DEBIAN
    • 54
      Massively supported
    • 50
      Stable
    • 21
      Reliable
    • 9
      Aptitude
    • 8
      Customizable
    • 8
      It is free
    • 8
      Turnkey linux use it
    • 6
      Works on all architectures
    CONS OF DEBIAN
    • 10
      Old versions of software
    • 2
      Can be difficult to set up on vanilla Debian

    related Debian posts

    Labinator Team

    At labinator.com, we use HTML5, CSS 3, Sass, Vanilla.JS and PHP when building our premium WordPress themes and plugins. When writing our codes, we use Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code depending on the project. We run Manjaro and Debian operating systems in our office. Manjaro is a great desktop operating system for all range of tasks while Debian is a solid choice for servers.

    WordPress became a very popular choice when it comes to content management systems and building websites. It is easy to learn and has a great community behind it. The high number of plugins as well that are available for WordPress allows any user to customize it depending on his/her needs.

    For development, HTML5 with Sass is our go-to choice when building our themes.

    Main Advantages Of Sass:

    • It's CSS syntax friendly
    • It offers variables
    • It uses a nested syntax
    • It includes mixins
    • Great community and online support.
    • Great documentation that is easy to read and follow.

    As for PHP, we always thrive to use PHP 7.3+. After the introduction of PHP 7, the WordPress development process became more stable and reliable than before. If you a developer considering PHP 7.3+ for your project, it would be good to note the following benefits.

    The Benefits Of Using PHP:

    • Open Source.
    • Highly Extendible.
    • Easy to learn and read.
    • Platform independent.
    • Compatible with APACHE.
    • Low development and maintenance cost.
    • Great community and support.
    • Detailed documentation that has everything you need!

    Why PHP 7.3+?

    • Flexible Heredoc & Nowdoc Syntaxes - Two key methods for defining strings within PHP. They also became easier to read and more reliable.
    • A good boost in performance speed which is extremely important when it comes to WordPress development.
    See more
    Tim Abbott
    Shared insights
    on
    DebianDebianUbuntuUbuntuFedoraFedora
    at

    We use Debian and its derivative Ubuntu because the apt ecosystem and toolchain for Debian packages is far superior to the yum-based system used by Fedora and RHEL. This is large part due to a huge amount of investment into tools like debhelper/dh over the years by the Debian community. I haven't dealt with RPM in the last couple years, but every experience I've had with RPM is that the RPM tools are slower, have less useful options, and it's more work to package software for them (and one makes more compromises in doing so).

    I think everyone has seen the better experience using Ubuntu in the shift of prevalence from RHEL to Ubuntu in what most new companies are deploying on their servers, and I expect that trend to continue as long as Red Hat is using the RPM system (and I don't really see them as having a path to migrate).

    The experience with Ubuntu and Debian stable releases is pretty similar: A solid release every 2 years that's supported for a few years. (While Ubuntu in theory releases every 6 months, their non-LTS releases are effectively betas: They're often unstable, only have 9 months of support, etc. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone not actively participating in Ubuntu the development community). Ubuntu has better integration of non-free drivers, which may be important if you have hardware that requires them. But it's also the case that most bugs I experience when using Ubuntu are Ubuntu-specific issues, especially on servers (in part because Ubuntu has a bunch of "cloud management" stuff pre-installed that is definitely a regression if you're not using Canonical's cloud management products).

    See more
    k3s logo

    k3s

    92
    240
    16
    Lightweight Kubernetes. 5 less than k8s (by Rancher Labs)
    92
    240
    + 1
    16
    PROS OF K3S
    • 6
      Lightweight
    • 4
      Easy
    • 2
      Replication Controller
    • 2
      Scale Services
    • 2
      Open Source
    CONS OF K3S
      Be the first to leave a con

      related k3s posts

      Enzo Gehlen
      Web Developer at IXCSoft · | 2 upvotes · 29.4K views
      Shared insights
      on
      k3sk3sK3dK3d

      Would you use K3d/k3s in an LXC container?

      See more
      Docker Compose logo

      Docker Compose

      21K
      15.9K
      501
      Define and run multi-container applications with Docker
      21K
      15.9K
      + 1
      501
      PROS OF DOCKER COMPOSE
      • 123
        Multi-container descriptor
      • 110
        Fast development environment setup
      • 79
        Easy linking of containers
      • 68
        Simple yaml configuration
      • 60
        Easy setup
      • 16
        Yml or yaml format
      • 12
        Use Standard Docker API
      • 8
        Open source
      • 5
        Go from template to application in minutes
      • 5
        Can choose Discovery Backend
      • 4
        Scalable
      • 4
        Easy configuration
      • 4
        Kubernetes integration
      • 3
        Quick and easy
      CONS OF DOCKER COMPOSE
      • 9
        Tied to single machine
      • 5
        Still very volatile, changing syntax often

      related Docker Compose posts

      Simon Reymann
      Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 8.9M views

      Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

      • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
      • Respectively Git as revision control system
      • SourceTree as Git GUI
      • Visual Studio Code as IDE
      • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
      • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
      • SonarQube as quality gate
      • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
      • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
      • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
      • Heroku for deploying in test environments
      • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
      • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
      • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
      • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
      • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

      The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

      • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
      • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
      • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
      • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
      • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
      • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
      See more

      Recently I have been working on an open source stack to help people consolidate their personal health data in a single database so that AI and analytics apps can be run against it to find personalized treatments. We chose to go with a #containerized approach leveraging Docker #containers with a local development environment setup with Docker Compose and nginx for container routing. For the production environment we chose to pull code from GitHub and build/push images using Jenkins and using Kubernetes to deploy to Amazon EC2.

      We also implemented a dashboard app to handle user authentication/authorization, as well as a custom SSO server that runs on Heroku which allows experts to easily visit more than one instance without having to login repeatedly. The #Backend was implemented using my favorite #Stack which consists of FeathersJS on top of Node.js and ExpressJS with PostgreSQL as the main database. The #Frontend was implemented using React, Redux.js, Semantic UI React and the FeathersJS client. Though testing was light on this project, we chose to use AVA as well as ESLint to keep the codebase clean and consistent.

      See more