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Tool Comparison Matrices

Honest, opinionated tool comparisons from an operator's perspective. Not vendor marketing — real trade-off analysis.

Every file follows the same structure so you can scan quickly: - Quick Decision Matrix — scan for your constraints - When to Pick Each — match your situation to a tool - Nobody Tells You — the stuff that bites you 6 months in - Migration Pain Assessment — what it costs to switch - The Interview Answer — what to say when asked "Why X over Y?"

Index

# Comparison Category Tools Compared
1 Container Orchestrators Orchestration K8s vs ECS vs Nomad vs Docker Swarm
2 Managed Kubernetes Orchestration EKS vs GKE vs AKS vs self-hosted
3 CI Platforms CI/CD GitHub Actions vs GitLab CI vs Jenkins vs CircleCI vs Argo Workflows
4 GitOps CD CI/CD ArgoCD vs Flux vs Spinnaker vs Harness
5 Metrics Platforms Observability Prometheus vs Datadog vs New Relic vs Grafana Cloud
6 Logging Platforms Observability ELK vs Loki vs Splunk vs CloudWatch Logs
7 Tracing Platforms Observability Jaeger vs Tempo vs Zipkin vs Datadog APM
8 Alerting & Paging Observability PagerDuty vs OpsGenie vs Grafana OnCall
9 IaC Tools Infrastructure as Code Terraform vs Pulumi vs CloudFormation vs CDK vs Crossplane
10 Config Management Infrastructure as Code Ansible vs Chef vs Puppet vs Salt
11 Ingress Controllers Networking Ingress-NGINX vs Traefik vs HAProxy vs AWS ALB
12 Service Meshes Networking Istio vs Linkerd vs Cilium vs no mesh
13 CNI Plugins Networking Calico vs Cilium vs Flannel vs AWS VPC CNI
14 Secrets Management Security Vault vs AWS Secrets Manager vs Sealed Secrets vs SOPS
15 Policy Engines Security OPA/Gatekeeper vs Kyverno vs Kubewarden
16 Image Scanners Security Trivy vs Snyk vs Grype vs Clair
17 Relational Databases Storage PostgreSQL vs MySQL vs Aurora
18 Caching Storage Redis vs Memcached vs DragonflyDB
19 Messaging Storage RabbitMQ vs Kafka vs NATS vs SQS
20 K8s Templating Developer Experience Helm vs Kustomize vs Carvel vs raw manifests
21 Local Dev Developer Experience Tilt vs Skaffold vs DevSpace vs Telepresence
22 Local Clusters Developer Experience Kind vs Minikube vs k3d vs Docker Desktop K8s

How These Were Written

These comparisons reflect real operational experience, not feature-list comparisons you can get from vendor docs. The "Nobody Tells You" sections are the most valuable — they capture things that only surface after months of production use.

Opinions are clearly marked as opinions. Facts are verifiable. Where the landscape is shifting fast, the date is noted so you know when to re-evaluate.