A fraternity who speaks about Cloud computing, K8S, Microservices would have received an email from Docker with title “Grace period ends January 31st. Important terms of service reminder for Docker desktop use” if you have docker accounts. What’s in for a software engineer from this mail? Stay relaxed if you are not in one of the following brackets:

• Working for a company that has less 250 employees.
• Your company annual revenue is less than USD 10 millions.

Others, please reach out to your managers or to your IT team as Docker desktop requires subscription from 1st Feb 2022. Docker pricing plans start as low as $ 5/month for more details please click here.

At this juncture or even immediately after the announcement few of us would have thought about the alternatives for Docker desktop. Before we go further we personally think “One(Business) should be paying for software that provides values”. For various reasons we would be still looking for alternatives let’s first list few alternatives and the criteria’s that we need to keep in mind while nailing an alternative for Docker desktop.

Today we may get N tools or applications when we try to identify or search for alternatives likewise for Docker the following propped up and there might be few more to the list which we might have not identified:

1. Kind
2. K3D
3. K3S
4. Microk8s
5. Minikube
6. Podman
7. LXD
8. Containerd
9. Buildah
10. Kaniko
11. RunC

With these alternates in hand before we choose one among them we need to set a criteria/expectations before we choose the best alternatives for Docker desktop the following are few options that we would like you to set:

1. Drop in replacement (has all features)
2. Similar/most of the features (run containers, build Containers, run K8S cluster locally)
3. Behaves the same way.
4. Additional requirements (will it require an VM to run? will it require a linux distribution? or any additional tools/software)
5. Setup & Maintenance
6. Security
7. Scalability
8. Ownership costs.

With the above in place please do due diligence before considering the alternatives for Docker desktop.

If you have a similar question please feel free to reach out to us by dropping an email to explore@techconative.com our experts from TechConative will be happy to help you!