10 Best DevOps Orchestration Tools For QA In 2023

Dynatrace is renowned as one of the best orchestration platforms for application performance management (APM). Dynatrace has something for everyone and its vast ecosystem of DevOps and application monitoring tools is impressive. However, its true calling card is observability.

Dynatrace analyzes the behavior of applications but goes much further by drilling deeper into components. Therefore, Dynatrace is ideal for businesses that want to gain visibility into dependencies, performance metrics, and root causes of intractable problems.

As an AIOps, Dynatrace uses its proprietary AI-centered software intelligence platform to collect data while performing real-time monitoring to detect hidden patterns responsible for the root causes of underlying issues. Using its digital performance management (DDPM) system, network administrators can auto-discover their entire IT ecosystem in a matter of moments.

It supports over 600 technologies, most of them critical to DevOps activities such as a slew of Amazon offerings, Ansible Tower, Azure Kubernetes Services, Bitbucket, Docker, Linux, Prometheus, and many more.

This versatile range allows Dynatrace to serve DevOps engineers throughout the software development lifecycle, including relevant activities like continuous integration, continuous delivery, version control, and container orchestration.

However, Dynatrace requires a significant investment in time and effort to develop the skills necessary to master it.

On the plus side, it offers simple and transparent pricing that starts with the following price points: Full-stack monitoring ($69 per month for 8 GB per host); infrastructure monitoring ($21 per month for 8 GB per host); digital experience monitoring ($11 per month); application security ($12 per month for 8 GB per host); and so on.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Minikube enables you to create and deploy a lightweight Kubernetes implementation. As a local Kubernetes engine, Minikube gives you the flexibility to do this via a virtual machine created on a local host computer.

With this single node cluster on your local machine, Minikube allows you to run stripped-down Kubernetes operations without having to invest the time or provide the systems resources necessary for a full-blown Kubernetes installation.

In addition to bootstrapping operations, you can also configure Minikube’s resource constraints from the convenience of the command line. This is vital since resources like disk usage, memory, and CPU are often correlated and tightly coupled with your source code.

Minikube also gives you other flexible choices, such as determining what version of Kubernetes you want, so you don’t have to be stuck with the specific version published by Docker Edge desktop distribution. In addition, Minikube can be installed on Windows, Linux, and macOS systems.

Minikube is ideal for beginners since it’s much easier to bootstrap and learn Kubernetes on a simplified local machine installation instead of getting overwhelmed by the steep learning curve of Kubernetes on commercial products.

The advantages of Minikube also double as its downsides. For instance, while it provides you with some functionality of Kubernetes, you can’t avail yourself of external resources like cloud load balancers.

Minikube is open source and free.

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.

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.

As containers gained preference over virtual machines, they became a vital part of DevOps solutions and workloads. Accordingly, most people familiar with containerization have most likely used or heard of Docker. As an orchestration management tool, Docker Swarm runs on the Docker engine.

You can use Docker Swarm to create, deploy, and manage a cluster (or swarm) of Docker engines.

Since Swarm uses Docker as its native clustering engine, installing Docker is a prerequisite. There isn’t much separation between Docker and Swarm as current versions of Docker now include Swarm mode.

To support load balancing and service discovery, Swarm uses DNS through a DNS server under the hood. Swarm also has a faster deployment time compared to other container orchestration tools.

Although Docker Swarm is useful and lightweight, it is very limited compared to Kubernetes. Docker Swarm doesn’t have in-built monitoring; this can only be achieved through third-party APIs. Also, it lacks the robust features of Kubernetes and its functionality is largely limited because it’s tied to the Docker API.

Swarm offers customized pricing upon request. Contact them for details.