14 Best DevOps Orchestration Tools For QA In 2023

QuerySurge is an end-to-end solution equipped with smart data testing software that is capable of automating the validation and testing process of critical data. It is a premier full DevOps solution for continuous data testing and orchestration. QuerySurge DevOps is capable of automating various tasks and processes, including software development, testing and other IT-related operations, effectively reducing the development lifecycle while delivering quality features, updates and fixes that are in alignment with operational goals and objectives.

QuerySurge also offers DevOps for data, also known as DataOps, which is a DevOps-type of automated process for critical data. It essentially applies various DevOps tools and approaches to the validation and testing of data. QuerySurge’s DevOps continuous testing solution executes various automated tests, which are triggered by predefined processes. This is a highly effective strategy as it generally provides immediate feedback on potential risks.

DevOps for Data is a fairly new release from QuerySurge. It enables testers to choose between a RESTful API and a Command Line API, while providing access to more than 60 API calls with close to 100 different properties. QuerySurge’s licensing and pricing options are quite transparent, starting from $11,493/user for the perpetual licensing option or $5,747/user for the subscription package with a minimum of two full users.

Kubernetes has become synonymous with container orchestration at scale. Kubernetes is far and away the number one choice for enterprise teams managing containerized and microservice-based apps.

Kubernetes provides the capacity to handle the critical tasks necessary to ensure high availability and keep node machines operational. Some of these include provisioning, service discovery, load-balancing, fault tolerance, and redundancy. It also has auto-scaling and self-healing capabilities by default.

Kubernetes is widely associated with Docker but it can be used with other container runtimes. Kubernetes affords you the opportunity to run it on-premises or as a cloud-native service. It provides a lot of simple ways to accomplish tasks, such as deploying applications to clusters, and environment configuration through declarative infrastructure in YAML files.

While Kubernetes has simplified an ordinarily complex container management process, its learning curve is still steep for most, in addition to being resource-hungry.

Kubernetes is open-source and free.

Rancher is an open-source orchestration tool for container management, especially for running containers in production. Rancher is versatile, providing full support for a range of container-based tools such as Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and Apache Mesos.

Instead of single cloud-hosted environments, Rancher excels in multi-cloud and hybrid deployments, equipping DevOps engineers with a common platform to manage their Kubernetes distributions.

Rancher comes with various installations to suit your cloud infrastructure needs. Among these Kubernetes distributions are K3s for running workloads at the network edge or inside IoT appliances, RKE for running containers, and Hosted Rancher for the control panel.

Rancher performs as a simple, easy-to-use, next-gen platform for full-stack teams that adopt container app deployment. So, Rancher provides your development environment with DevOps tools to facilitate the development process.

In addition to a CLI tool to manage clusters, Rancher has an intuitive GUI with deployment tools such as native Docker API tools. This GUI provides convenience and a streamlined approach to managing a group of clusters from a central location.

Although Rancher is free, you have to pay a fee for support. This makes it an ideal technology for managing Kubernetes clusters for price-sensitive customers.

Containership is an open-source platform geared to help users manage all kinds of multiple host clusters, especially those that run containerized applications like Kubernetes. Containership allows you to nimbly operate across one or many cloud providers or data centers.Operating as a container-as-a-service tech stack component, Containership makes it simple for users to build, manage, and scale their containerized web infrastructure. Its features include multi cloud management, access control, cost management, demand monitoring, performance and capacity analytics. Containership lets you easily navigate movement between cloud hosts with a click of a button. It also has built-in disaster recovery and supports applications with persistent data needs.Containership cloud provides pricing information upon request.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) typically operates as a fully managed, cloud-native Kubernetes service. EKS is also tightly integrated with the robust Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystem, thus allowing you to take advantage of its efficient computing resources to provision your Kubernetes infrastructure.

But it also provides customers with other choices, including on-premises, hybrid environments, and deployment options with your own tools. This added flexibility means EKS doesn’t require you to migrate your workloads to AWS.

As a Kubernetes orchestration platform, EKS removes the burden of orchestrating the deployment of apps. Like its Azure counterpart, EKS also manages the Kubernetes control panel on your behalf. As a result, you can focus on your web applications instead of worrying about the performance of your nodes.

With EKS, you have the best of both worlds, by getting the benefit of AWS-supported products, in addition to the open-source solutions built by the Kubernetes community.

EKS provides an AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate how much you’ll be charged given the resources you’ll consume. As a flat rate, EKS charges customers $0.10 per hour for each Amazon EKS cluster they create.

Ansible is an open-source, simple to use, and agentless automation tool from Red Hat. It has a light footprint, requiring less maintenance overhead because it doesn’t need any Ansible agent to be installed or deployed on the host machine.

Ansible is used to manage, scale, and automate complex deployments. It is often used for app deployment and continuous delivery pipeline automation. It can be used by those with little or no scripting or coding experience because it uses the declarative configuration in YAML-based files known as Playbooks.

However, you need to use SSH, which is already a dependency, for communication and have Python installed. The downside to agentless automation is that connecting to thousands of boxes across your IT infrastructure via SSH doesn’t particularly scale well.

While Ansible is free, there’s commercial support for the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform in two editions. The standard edition is designed for enterprise IT processes while the premium version caters to mission-critical DevOps.

Both offer customized pricing upon request.

Red Hat OpenShift is a flagship enterprise container management and Kubernetes platform built for a hybrid-cloud strategy. OpenShift is suitable as either an on-premise or public cloud hosting platform where developers can build, test, run, and deploy apps.

As a platform-as-a-service application tool, OpenShift contains plenty of rich features that makes it useful for developers and DevOps teams who need to straddle both traditional and modernized IT infrastructure. It provides support for popular tools like Java, Jira, Gitlab, and Jenkins.

Most importantly, it allows you to start where you are at and grow from there, automating everything from upgrades, installation, and lifecycle management.

OpenShift provides autoscaling functionality by enabling clustering and allowing the automatic scaling of app resources through adding more instances to your application.

OpenShift has been recognized as a leading multi-cloud container development platform provider by Forrester Wave Report.

OpenShift offers customized pricing upon request.

Microsoft’s Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) provides users with a managed, cloud-based container orchestration platform based on Kubernetes. It is used to quickly create, deploy, and manage Kubernetes clusters. AKS essentially enables you to build and deploy scalable apps with Docker and Kubernetes on top of Microsoft Azure’s cloud platform.

But why not choose Kubernetes directly instead of through AKS data centers? Well, AKS provides you with a variety of advantages that aren’t readily available when you directly manage Kubernetes. AKS is run by a capable cloud vendor that robustly supports the underlying architecture.

AKS’ serverless Kubernetes means you don’t have to worry about hardware concerns. This provides you with elasticity in provisioning and more capacity in terms of adding additional resources without the need to actively manage your infrastructure.

AKS is ideal for those who want to avoid or at least minimize the hassles of hands-on management of the clusters.

For instance, AKS allows you to use Kubernetes while saving you the trouble of managing the Kubernetes API or the cluster state. Because AKS abstracts the task of the Kubernetes control panel, all a customer has to do is select a server type of their choice and run workloads on their machine nodes.

AKS combines cluster auto-scaling pools with an automatic repair feature for nodes.

However, there are downsides to running managed Kubernetes service. The onus is on you and your provider to ensure Kubernetes updates are diligently applied. Therefore, though AKS has enterprise-grade security and governance, you’ll still need to ensure Kubernetes security patches are applied.

AKS offers customized pricing upon request.

Marathon is an orchestration tool designed as a fundamental building block for Apache Mesos and Mesosphere’s Datacenter Operating System (DC/OS). As a result, Marathon provides first-class support for Mesos containers using Docker and cgroups.Marathon has a well-designed UI with clean functionality, which provides intuitively clear insight and visibility of what is happening with containers. It binds persistent storage volumes directly to your application, along with providing application and disaster recovery capabilities. Marathon provides other pertinent cloud features including load balancing and service discovery.Marathon is equipped with several HTTP methods, which allows you to perform HTTP or TCP health checks on applications and subscribe to events in order to receive notifications. The availability of endpoints are useful for integrating with external load balancers.Marathon is also compatible with databases such as MySQL and Postgres, with their storage accounted for by Mesos. Querying metrics is as simple as using JSON formats, which can be pushed to monitoring and observability services like Datadog or Graphite studio. Marathon’s API can also integrate with Docker, Prometheus, JBoss Portal, among others.Marathon operates a free version and has not listed other pricing information publicly.

Nomad is a simple, lightweight workload orchestrator for both container and non-container apps. Nomad can also be deployed in various configurations, whether on-premise, as a multi-region service, on the cloud, or even as multi-cloud federation worldwide.

Nomad’s major strengths are its universality, simplicity, flexibility, and minimal overhead. It is deployed as a single binary, so its light footprint integrates easily into your existing infrastructure. Support is provided for Windows, Java, and VMs while orchestrating support for Docker containers and other types of services.

Nomad doesn’t have the breadth of features of other orchestration tools on the list but it strives to do a few things particularly well.

Nomad is created by HashiCorp, so it integrates natively with the products like Terraform, providing infrastructure as code to manage jobs and cloud resources as added benefits. Others include leveraging HashiCorp’s Vault for ACL management and Consul for service discovery.

Nomad is well-suited for users and situations where Kubernetes is overkill for their needs and requirements.

Nomad has two editions: its Open Source edition is free, while you’ll need to contact the sales department for the Enterprise pricing.