Beyond Docker - A DevOps Engineer's Guide to Container Alternatives

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on dev.to

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  1. buildkit

    concurrent, cache-efficient, and Dockerfile-agnostic builder toolkit

    I remember when container builds were slow and not really efficient, and were usually a bottleneck of our CI/CD pipelines. That is until I discovered BuildKit and my life changed. BuildKit is the next-generation builder engine for Docker, but it can also be used independently.

  2. Nutrient

    Nutrient - The #1 PDF SDK Library. Bad PDFs = bad UX. Slow load times, broken annotations, clunky UX frustrates users. Nutrient’s PDF SDKs gives seamless document experiences, fast rendering, annotations, real-time collaboration, 100+ features. Used by 10K+ devs, serving ~half a billion users worldwide. Explore the SDK for free.

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  3. podman

    Podman: A tool for managing OCI containers and pods.

    In the intensity of working as a DevOps engineer with the container, I have found Podman to be a game-changer in teams that take the security aspect seriously-that means avoiding root privileges. It's daemonless compared with Docker, which is a big architectural change. Daemonless approach just magically changes how teams do container security in production environments.

  4. distrobuilder

    System container image builder for LXC and Incus

    Working with legacy applications that needed full system access taught me that a different way to do containerization is by using LXC/LXD. The focus in system containers, rather than application containers, can be thought of like a light VM rather than what most consider the typical container.

  5. containerd

    An open and reliable container runtime

    Having operated large Kubernetes clusters, one learns to love the focused approach of containerd. A light-weight, high-performance container runtime, it powers a lot of container platforms, including indirectly, Kubernetes. From my experience, containerd really does one thing and does it well: it runs containers efficiently.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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