Portainer

Portainer is a container management console for ops teams running Kubernetes, Docker, Swarm and Podman, sold per node with an open source edition.

Portainer gives operations teams one browser console for the container environments they run, whether those are Kubernetes clusters, Docker hosts, Swarm services or Podman machines. Every environment appears in a single Environments list on the Home view. The Portainer Server runs as a container on a Docker engine, and agents connect the environments it manages. Portainer.io Ltd., an independent company in Auckland, New Zealand, builds it as an open source Community Edition and a commercial Business Edition. Kubernetes work centres on the Applications form, where a team sets CPU and memory reservations, switches on auto scaling against a CPU target and exposes ConfigMaps and secrets as environment variables. Namespaces carry resource quotas and access management tied to Kubernetes RBAC, and Business Edition policies become native network policies and registry rules. Applications come from a Helm repository, a Git repository or Custom Templates, and GitOps deploys pick up changes by polling or by webhook. On Docker and Swarm, Stacks use the docker-compose format and images can be built from a Dockerfile in the web editor. Edge stacks, Helm charts included, reach remote devices that run the Edge Agent. Portainer is built for platform and operations teams that look after several clusters and hosts and want one place to govern them. It suits companies that hand deployment to developers, because administrators decide which namespaces and registries each team can use. Firms with fleets of edge devices manage those sites in the same console as their data centre clusters. A common job is moving a team's manifests and Helm charts into GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket and letting Portainer keep each cluster in step with the repository. Another is a self-service route for developers to deploy into approved namespaces, with images pulled from AWS ECR or the GitHub and GitLab registries. Teams standardising on Talos create clusters through Talos Omni from inside the console, and KubeSolo, the company's single-node Kubernetes distribution, is managed from it as well. For a company whose containers run across Kubernetes, Docker and edge hardware, Portainer is the console where each of those environments is governed.