Container Orchestration – Everything You Need to Know

With container orchestration, users can deploy, manage, scale, and network containers automatically. This is a significant time-saver for companies and hosts depending on the efficient deployment and management of Linux containers.

Container orchestration can be utilized wherever and whenever teams need to employ containers. One benefit of container orchestration is that it allows for the deployment of a single application throughout multiple environments, without it having to be reworked.

Furthermore, container microservices make orchestrating such key aspects as networking, storage, and security simpler.

Containers offer any apps based on microservices a fantastic deployment unit and self-contained environment for executions. This enables teams to run several independent elements of an app in microservices on one piece of hardware, while enjoying better control over the individual components and lifecycles.

Managing containers’ lifecycles with orchestration helps DevOps teams to integrate it with CI/CD workflows. That’s why containerized microservices are fundamental for cloud-native applications, along with APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).

Why teams work with container orchestration

Teams can take advantage of container orchestration for the automation and management of:

  • Allocating resources
  • Scheduling and configuring
  • Finding available containers
  • Provisioning & deployment
  • Routing traffic and balancing loads
  • Scaling/taking out containers according to variable workloads
  • Tracking health of containers
  • Maintaining security between interactions
  • Configuration of applications based on the respective containers chosen to run them

As you can see, container orchestration has the power to streamline processes and save considerable time.

The right tools for container orchestration

Container orchestration tools offer a framework with which to manage any containers as well as microservices design at scale. Various container orchestration tools are available for management of container lifecycles, such as Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Apache Mesos.

In a discussion of Apache Moss vs Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes, the latter may be more popular.

Kubernetes was originally created and built by Google engineers, as an open source project. Google donated Kubernetes to its Cloud Native Computing Foundation back in 2015. This tool enables teams to make application services across several containers, as well as scheduling containers throughout a cluster, scaling said containers, and managing their individual health conditions down the line.

This tool does away with a lot of manual tasks required to deploy and scale containerized applications. You also have the flexibility to cluster host groups, virtual or physical machines, and run Linux containers. Helpfully, Kubernetes presents users with a platform for efficient, simple cluster management.

Furthermore, this tool helps teams to implement and depend on container-based infrastructure within production spaces. These clusters may be placed across multiple clouds, whether private, public, or hybrid. That’s why Kubernetes is such a terrific platform to host cloud-native apps which demand fast scaling.

Kubernetes helps manage workload portability and balancing loads through movement of applications with no need to redesign them at all.

The key elements of Kubernetes

Kubernetes consists of:

Kubelet

The Kubelet service is based on nodes, and analyzes container manifests to ensure relevant containers start running.

Cluster

A number of nodes, including one or more master nodes and multiple worker nodes.

Master

This is the machine responsible for controlling Kubernetes nodes, and all task assignments come from here.

Pod

This is a group of multiple containers all deployed to an individual node. These containers share an IPC, IP address, and host name (along with additional resources).

How container orchestration functions

Any teams which leverage container orchestration tools (including Kubernetes) will describe an application’s configuration through JSON or YAML files. A configuration file informs the container management tool where container images are located. It also specifies the network establishment process, and where logs should be place.

In the implementation of a new container, the container management tool will schedule the deployment to a designated cluster in an automated process. It will also locate the right host, and take the specific requirements or limitations into account. After this, the orchestration tool handles managing the container lifecycle according to the specifications determined within the compose file.

Teams can utilize Kubernetes patterns for management of container-based applications or services, across configuration, lifecycle, and scaling. A Kubernetes developer depends on these repetitive patterns to build a complete system.

Container orchestration may be leveraged in a setting which requires utilization of containers, such as for on-site servers or private/public cloud processes.

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