What is a Container Orchestration?

Container platforms like Docker are very popular these days to package applications based on a microservices architecture. Containers can be made highly scalable, which can be created on-demand. While this is good for a few containers but imagine you have hundreds of them.

It becomes extremely difficult to manage the container lifecycle and its management when numbers increase dynamically with demand.

Container orchestration solves the problem by automating the scheduling, deployment, scalability, load balancing, availability, and networking of containers. Container orchestration is the automation and management of the lifecycle of containers and services.

It is a process of managing and organizing multiple containers and microservices architecture at scale.

Luckily, there are many container orchestration tools available in the market.

Let’s explore them!

Kubernetes

You guessed it, isn’t it?

Kubernetes is an open-source platform that was originally designed by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Kubernetes supports both declarative configuration and automation. It can help to automate deployment, scaling, and management of containerized workload and services.

Image by Kubernetes.io

Kubernetes API helps to establish communication between users, cluster components, and external third-party components. Kubernetes control plane, and Nodes run on a group of nodes that together form the cluster. Application workload consists of one or more Pods which runs on Worker node(s). The control plane manages Pods and worker nodes.

Companies like Babylon, Booking.com, AppDirect extensively use Kubernetes.

Features

• Service discovery and load balancing
• Storage orchestration
• Automated rollouts and rollbacks
• Horizontal scaling
• Secret and configuration management
• Self-healing
• Batch execution
• IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack
• Automatic bin packing

#cloud computing #sysadmin #docker #devops