Cloud & Infrastructure
Containerization & Orchestration
Container runtimes, orchestration platforms, and cloud-native infrastructure
Overview
Container technologies package applications with their dependencies into portable, lightweight units that run consistently across environments. Orchestration platforms automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized workloads.
Top Players
Kubernetes
- Maintained by: Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)
- Market Position: De facto standard for container orchestration
- Key Strengths: Massive ecosystem, cloud-agnostic, declarative configuration, self-healing, auto-scaling
- Managed Versions: EKS (AWS), AKS (Azure), GKE (Google), OKE (Oracle)
- Typical Users: Platform engineering teams, microservices architectures
Docker
- Company: Docker Inc. (USA)
- Market Position: Pioneer and standard for container images and local development
- Key Strengths: Docker Desktop for local dev, Docker Hub (largest container registry), Docker Compose for multi-container apps
- Products: Docker Desktop, Docker Hub, Docker Scout (security), Docker Build Cloud
- Typical Users: Every developer working with containers
Red Hat OpenShift
- Company: Red Hat / IBM (USA)
- Market Position: Leading enterprise Kubernetes platform
- Key Strengths: Enterprise-grade security, built-in CI/CD (Tekton), developer tools, multi-cluster management
- Deployment: On-premise, AWS (ROSA), Azure (ARO), GCP, IBM Cloud
- Typical Customers: Large enterprises, regulated industries
Rancher (SUSE)
- Company: SUSE (Germany)
- Market Position: Leading multi-cluster Kubernetes management platform
- Key Strengths: Multi-cluster management, lightweight K3s distribution for edge, open-source friendly
- Products: Rancher, K3s, RKE2, Harvester
- Typical Customers: Organizations managing multiple Kubernetes clusters
HashiCorp Nomad
- Company: HashiCorp / IBM (USA)
- Market Position: Alternative orchestrator for mixed workloads
- Key Strengths: Simple operations, supports containers + VMs + binaries, integrates with Vault/Consul, lower complexity than K8s
- Deployment: Self-managed, HCP (HashiCorp Cloud)
- Typical Customers: Teams wanting simpler orchestration without full K8s complexity
Key Trends
- Platform engineering: Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) built on Kubernetes
- WebAssembly (Wasm): Emerging as lightweight alternative to containers for some workloads
- GitOps: Argo CD and Flux driving declarative, Git-based infrastructure management
- Edge computing: Lightweight Kubernetes distributions (K3s, MicroK8s) running at the edge