Top Docker Tools: 51 Useful Docker Tools for Every Stage of the Development Pipeline
By: Alexandra
| March 5, 2024
Docker is sweeping across startups and enterprises alike, changing the way we build and ship applications. It’s the most prominent and widely known software container platform, and it’s particularly useful for eliminating common challenges when collaborating on code (like the “it works on my machine” phenomenon that most devs know all too well). With Docker, you can run and manage apps side-by-side – in isolated containers – resulting in better compute density. It’s something that many developers don’t think about, but you can even use Docker with ASP.NET.
You probably don’t need to be sold on the many appealing Docker capabilities, but you might not be familiar with the wide range of third-party tools that integrate seamlessly with Docker, from logging tools to database tools, CI tools, and more. Docker, of course, has its own tools for managing containers, but in this post, we’re going to look at third-party tools that are essential to enabling a great container experience in your organization. We’ll walk through 50 of the user-friendly, functional Docker tools you can use to transform your software development at every stage, including:
Read on to find out how you can leverage these tools to create a better container experience. And when you’re ready to discover more tools to manage and improve your code, download our Ultimate Dev Toolbox – it’s free!
Kubernetes is, without a doubt, the leading container orchestrator available today. It groups containers into clusters and decouples your apps from the underlying infrastructure that powers them.
Key Features:
Scale your infrastructure effortlessly, without growing your Ops team
Open source tool allows you to extend for your custom needs
Battle-tested by Google, where it was developed, and able to scale to more than 5,000 nodes
Mesosphere makes building and deploying web-scale applications fast and reliable. Used at Twitter, AirBnB, and a host of other large-scale organizations, Mesosphere is one of the early container orchestrators to make it big.
Key Features:
Based on the open source Apache Mesos cluster manager
Treats the entire datacenter as a single super computer
New data services available: Alluxio, Elastic Shark, Redis Labs, Datastax Enterprise and Couchbase Server
Cost: Contact for cost information (pricing based on number of nodes/environment)
From running a single container to running thousands of them, this tools allows you to run up to 1 million containers on 5,000 hosts in a meager 5 minutes.
Key Features:
Supports Linux, Windows, BSD, and OSX to run any workload
Provides multi-datacenter support to enable you to run applications from any cloud
Increases density and reduces costs by efficiently packing applications on the server
Kubernetes can be hard to setup and maintain on your own. Tectonic provides Kubernetes as a service so you can focus on building and shipping your app, not maintaining Kubernetes.
Key Features:
Provides updates keeping with the Kubernetes release cycle
Includes a built-in installer to get you up and running
Backed by the capable CoreOS team which makes up a large contributor base of the Kubernetes open source project
Cost: Free for use up to 10 nodes; contact for cost for 10+ nodes
Platform9 initially focussed on OpenStack, but now is shifting focus to Kubernetes. It manages the entire container lifecycle from provisioning and deployment to monitoring and access control.
Key Features:
Requires no maintenance and easily mergers with your infrastructure
Provides 24×7 monitoring capabilities to keep the user aware
Completely integrated with OpenStack and Kubernetes
Cost: Contact for pricing (cost based on CPU socket per year; minimum 20 sockets and a 1-year commitment)
Elasticsearch is a data storage and analytics tool capable of solving a growing number of use cases. It’s the heart of the Elastic Stack, storing your data centrally for deeper insights and analysis.
Key Features:
Identifies unusual activity in applications functions
Can be easily integrated into any existing Docker monitoring system
Machine learning (available as an add-on feature as part of the X-Pack subscription offering)
Docker containers are ephemeral, which means as you delete a container, its storage is lost. To store data persistently, leverage Flocker, which migrates data as your containers are migrated across your infrastructure.
Key Features:
Easily manage your storage for containers
Moves data between databases, and databases between servers
Support various storage environments including AWS EBS, Google Persistent Disk, Pure Storage, etc.
If you are having a hard time with your SDNs because of them being centrally managed and traditional, this tool simplifies it for you with a distributed networking layer.
Key Features:
Provides a simplified network model design
Easily scales from a single laptop to an enterprise deployment
Customize and define which connections are allowed and which are not
EC2 container service (ECS) relieves you of the stress of scheduling and deploying multiple containers, by doing them itself. If you’ve got infrastructure on AWS already, ECS is your fastest route to containerization.
Key Features:
Based on the leading cloud vendor, AWS, it is highly stable, scalable, and easy to use
Monitors clusters and shows the resources used and resources available
Easily deploy, upgrade and rollback thousands of containers without lags
Cost: Pay only for AWS services you create to store and run your application.
Enables you to treat infrastructure as code. Create, upgrade your applications to newer versions and deploy it efficiently and quickly using this tool.
Key Features:
Provides a preview of your execution plan before you press apply
Builds infrastructures efficiently and shows the number of dependencies on it
Show the change and the order of change after execution to decrease errors
InSpec, from Chef, is an infrastructure testing and compliance testing tool. It works with Chef to not just create new instances, but ensure they are compliant.
Key Features:
Tests the infrastructure and provides results in easy to understand language
Enforce your security rules with any application under development
Provides remote testing and a local testing agent if needed
A leading continuous integration (CI) tool that helps to automate build and test cycles for any application, Jenkins is an essential tool for many DevOps teams.
Key Features:
Provides hundreds of plugins to integrate with other tools across the stack
A self-contained Java based program, Jenkins runs right out of the box
Retrace is the only developer tool that combines APM, logs, errors, monitoring, and metrics in a fully-integrated, multi-environment suite with powerful monitoring and logging capabilities. Plus, it works out of the box with your existing stack.
Heroku is the leading Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that comes with more than 150 add-ons and more than 3000 ready-to-deploy buttons to increase your production time and decrease the time you take to solve issues.
Key Features:
Provides complete assistance with failovers, patching, upgrading, and system builds
Sets up, operates and maintains your work so that you can focus on creating more useful applications
Is now evolving to support Docker workflows
Cost:
Free: 1 web, 1 worker
Hobby: $7 per dyno/month
Standard and Performance Plans: $25 to $500 per dyno/month
An open source PaaS tool helping you in every step of your application, offering a fast and safe deploy process with a simple Git push, optimizing your resource utilization, rebalancing resources, and recovering failed units and nodes automatically.
Key Features:
Runs applications written in any language easily
Lets you deploy Docker images with ease
Customize the resource allocation for your application
Cost: Free
These are 50 tools that help you work on Docker, but they’re certainly not the only ones. Theses tools play various roles in your process of creating applications, containerizing them, and deploying them in distributed clusters. We hope this list of Docker tools will help make your work more efficient, faster and simpler. If we missed your favorite Docker tool, let us know in the comments below!
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