WHY ORION
Most orchestrators stop at containers.
Orion orchestrates the compute your team runs.
Kubernetes schedules containers. Orion schedules everything your team runs on top of it: workstations, VMs, notebooks, GPU jobs, and apps, on hardware you own.
HOW ORION IS BUILT
Admins configure and govern. Everyone else logs in and launches.
Orion sits on the machines you already have. Admins decide who gets what. People open a browser and start working. The workload engine in the middle puts each session on a machine and connects it back to the person who asked.
ONE PLANE, END TO END
Orion runs the compute and gets it to your people.
Orion schedules work across bare metal, the vSphere and Proxmox hosts you already run, and cloud VMs on AWS. VMs and containers run side by side, and GPUs are time-sliced between containers. Most schedulers stop there, so someone still has to get that capacity to your team. Orion does that part too. People launch work from a catalog and add tools from the app store, their identity follows them to their files, quotas keep each team’s share fair, and admins run all of it in Orion Admin, connected or offline.
Ten reasons teams run Orion.
HOW ORION COMPARES
Orion next to the usual alternatives.
Most teams get here after stitching tools together, buying VDI for desktops, or running a compute cluster with a scheduler like Slurm. Here is how those approaches compare on the questions people ask first.
A general comparison of approaches, not of any named product. Tell us what you run today and we will compare it properly.
| Orion | Separate tools you wire together | VDI | Compute cluster | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Containers, VMs and Linux desktops in one place | One catalog for all three | One tool per kind | Desktops and VMs | Batch jobs |
| People launch work from a browser | Pick an app and go | If you build a portal | Yes, for desktops | Submit and wait |
| GPU time-slicing | Built in, for containers | You configure it | Vendor-specific | Not the focus |
| RBAC, SSO and POSIX on every session | Built in | Set up per tool | Covers desktops | Covers the queue |
| Bare metal, hypervisors or cloud VMs, x86 and ARM | Any of them, mixed | Your choice, your glue | Depends on the vendor | Your farm nodes |
| Customer-hosted, built to run air-gapped | Yes, nothing phones home | If you build it that way | Varies | Varies |
| Apps installed from a form | 50+ plugins | You maintain the images | Golden images | Per-application plugins |
A general comparison of approaches, not of any named product. Tell us what you run today and we will compare it properly.
Questions people ask.
Works with what you already run.
Orion is hardware and software agnostic by design. Keep the machines and tools you have today, and change them whenever you want. Orion Apps installs plugins from the official repo or from your own. Package a tool in the plugin format and it sits in the same catalog as everything else.
Own the stack.
Orion installs inside your network and stays there. Nothing calls home, so it keeps running when the internet doesn’t.
Customer-hosted
You run it on your machines. We never host it.
Built to run air-gapped
Every install can run with no internet connection.
Your hardware
Bare metal, hypervisors, or cloud VMs. x86 or ARM.
Your data stays with you
Nothing about your workloads leaves your network.
“Now we walk in and everything is already on screen.”
RICHARD SHUSTER · SKID SLAYER, BUILT ON ORION BY KINDWELL
<4 min
to provision an environment, down from 2 to 3 days · Undersun via Kindwell
9 days
full agent build, down from an estimated 15 to 18 · Undersun via Kindwell
60-90s
request to running workload
KEEP GOING
