CONTAINER ORCHESTRATION THE BASICS

In this piece, I will be explaining the basics of container orchestration and how it can help you scale containerized applications easily.

Container orchestration has become a trending topic over the years, with many organizations moving to the cloud. Containers have become popular and have changed the way organizations build, ship, deploy, maintain modern software development and also migrate older applications.

• What is Container Orchestration?
• Container orchestration and microservices?
• What Problems Does Container Orchestration Solve?
• How Does Container Orchestration Work?
• What Container Orchestration Tools are Available & How to Choose the Right Container Orchestration Tool?

What is Container Orchestration?

Container orchestration is the process of managing the lifecycle of containers and services in an automated way. In simple terms, it manages multiple containers and microservices architecture at scale. Container deployment and scaling, networking, health monitoring, storage capabilities, failover procedures and maintenance are all aspects of orchestrating containers.

Container Orchestration and Microservices?

We now understand how container orchestration works, let’s delve into microservices. It’s important to understand the concept of microservices because container orchestration platforms won’t work effectively with applications that don’t follow basic microservices principles.

What are microservices? A microservice is a service-oriented application component that is tightly scoped, strongly encapsulated, loosely coupled, independently deployable and scalable. According to AWS, microservice architecture involves building an application as independent components that run each application process as a service, with these services communicating via a well-defined interface using lightweight APIs.

What Problems Does Container Orchestration Solve?

• Fault tolerant and self-healing infrastructure improves reliability
• Manage Life Cycle of containers
• Provide platform to run, manage, operate containers
• Provide infrastructure like memory, cpu, storage, networking for the container workloads and manages these infrastructure
• Provide dashboard to manage all these container workloads and infrastructure
• Provide logging, monitoring
• Support third party plugin integration for various jobs

How Does Container Orchestration Work?

Modern orchestration tools use declarative programming to ease container deployments and management. This is different from using imperative language. The declarative approach defines the desired outcome or what we want to accomplish without feeding the tool with the step-by-step details of how to do it. while the imperative approach defines how an object state should change and the exact order in which those changes should be executed.

Container orchestration covers a variety of methods depending on the container orchestration tool used. Overall, container orchestration tools communicate with a user-created YAML or JSON file that describes the configuration of the application. The configurations files (e.g, Docker-compose.yml) point the orchestration tool where to collect container images (e.g, Docker Hub), how to create a network between containers, where to store log data or mount storage volumes.

With container orchestration, you can manage when and how containers start and stop, group them into clusters, schedule and coordinate components' activities, monitor health, distribute updates, and institute failover and recovery processes.

Engineers who work in DevOps cultures use container orchestration platforms and tools to automate that process throughout the lifecycle of containers and the beauty of orchestration tools is that you can use them in any environment in which you can run containers.

What Container Orchestration Tools are Available & How Do You Choose the Right Container Orchestration Tool?

What Container Orchestration Tools are Available?

Container orchestration support is possible through a variety of platforms which are listed below
The following are the top container orchestrators

• Kubernetes
• Docker Swarm
• Apache Mesos
• Nomad
• Rancher
• Openshift

Container orchestration with Kubernetes is one of the most popular and several Kubernetes-as-a-Service providers are built on top of the Kubernetes orchestration tools include Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

I would highly recommend you Checkout this blog post. It explains what Kubernetes is (abbreviated as K8S) and what a K8s cluster is. It also covers components of the master node and worker nodes that make up a K8s cluster What Is a Kubernetes Cluster? Key Components Explained.

How Do You Choose the Right Container Orchestration Tool?

With so many options available, choosing the right container orchestration tool for your organisation involves a variety of factors including the number of containers in your container deployment, the technical experience of your system administrator or IT team, or the specific needs of your containerised application. The three most widely used frameworks for container management are open-source, and there are benefits and challenges associated with each containerisation platform.

In summary, Container orchestration can be performed in any type of environment local servers, private clouds, 3rd party clouds or any combination. No matter where they are, containers are containers.