Best Container Engines for Linux

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.

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

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides fast, flexible, and affordable compute capacity to fit any workload need from performant bare metal servers and VMs to lightweight containers. OCI Compute provides uniquely flexible VM and bare metal instances for optimal price-performance. Select exactly the number of cores and the memory your applications need. Delivering high performance for enterprise workloads. Simplify application development with serverless computing. Your choice of technologies includes Kubernetes and containers. NVIDIA GPUs for machine learning, scientific visualization, and other graphics processing. Capabilities such as RDMA, high-performance storage, and network traffic isolation. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure consistently delivers better price performance than other cloud providers. Virtual machine-based (VM) shapes offer customizable core and memory combinations. Customers can optimize costs by choosing a specific number of cores.

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.

rkt is an application container engine developed for modern production cloud-native environments. It features a pod-native approach, a pluggable execution environment, and a well-defined surface area that makes it ideal for integration with other systems. The core execution unit of rkt is the pod, a collection of one or more applications executing in a shared context (rkt's pods are synonymous with the concept in the Kubernetes orchestration system). rkt allows users to apply different configurations (like isolation parameters) at both pod-level and at the more granular per-application level. rkt's architecture means that each pod executes directly in the classic Unix process model (i.e. there is no central daemon), in a self-contained, isolated environment. rkt implements a modern, open, standard container format, the App Container (appc) spec, but can also execute other container images, like those created with Docker.

Low-ops, minimal production Kubernetes, for devs, cloud, clusters, workstations, Edge and IoT. MicroK8s automatically chooses the best nodes for the Kubernetes datastore. When you lose a cluster database node, another node is promoted. No admin needed for your bulletproof edge. MicroK8s is small, with sensible defaults that ‘just work’. A quick install, easy upgrades and great security make it perfect for micro clouds and edge computing. Full enterprise support available, with no subscription needed. Optional 24/7 support with 10 year security maintenance. Under the cell tower. On the racecar. On satellites or everyday appliances, MicroK8s delivers the full Kubernetes experience on IoT and micro clouds. Fully containerized deployment with compressed over-the-air updates for ultra-reliable operations. MicroK8s will apply security updates automatically by default, defer them if you want. Upgrade to a newer version of Kubernetes with a single command. It’s really that easy.

Mirantis Container Runtime (MCR), formerly Docker Engine Enterprise, is a secure, enterprise-grade container runtime that enables teams to build and run containers natively on Linux and Windows while using familiar Docker CLI, Dockerfiles, and APIs to power business-critical applications with industry-leading container engine technology and certified support for Kubernetes and Swarm. MCR is fully compatible with Docker-based workflows and toolchains, providing a seamless path from development to production and tested, validated releases across a broad set of operating systems with robust CVE patching and bug fixes to ensure workload stability. It delivers world-class security with FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic modules, mandatory access controls such as AppArmor and SELinux, image signature verification, and support for sandboxed runtimes like Kata and gVisor to enforce trusted, compliant containers.