What is container orchestration? — techctl.com
Over the past few years, containers have become a hot topic. It has dramatically changed the way software companies build, ship, and maintain applications. But do you know how can we efficiently manage the lifecycle of containers using container orchestration?
Running a production application means more than simply creating a container and running it. It means the management of the entire lifecycle of containers. That’s where container orchestration comes into the picture.
Container orchestration is the automation of much of the operational efforts needed to run the container workload. In other words, it automates the scheduling, deployment, networking, scaling, monitoring, and all other aspects of managing containers.
What problems does container orchestration solve?
Let us consider the below example. We have three VMs or nodes and we have to run two instances of the webserver. One way to implement this setup is to run a webserver container on two of the node.
Let say, due to some issue, node-1 crashes. This will result in the failure of the web server running on node-1. This can be very critical in the case of a production environment.
If such a scenario occurs, we have to manually start the webserver container on node-3. However, an efficient way to do this is to automate this process by using a container orchestration tool that can monitor the health of containers and always maintain the requested number of replicas of the container.
Let’s consider another example. Let say we have a container that needs to be scaled to few hundred or thousand of instances on local servers and cloud provider. Do you think it will an easy task?
Some of the challenges we’ll face to perform this task:
- Do you know which hosts are overutilized?
- Can you easily implement the update and rollback of the application irrespective of where they are located?
- Is your application load-balanced across multiple servers?
- Can you easily modify the deployment?
If we consider this aspect of container deployment, then it may not be an easy task. However, if we use container orchestration then we can easily and efficiently manage these jobs.
Some of the functionality of a container orchestration tool are:
- Easy scaling of application and infrastructure
- Container health monitoring
- Evenly load balancing of container across available hosts
- Optimal resource allocation
- Managing service discovery and container networking
- Proper security control
- Container lifecycle management
What Container Orchestration Tools are available?
Some of the container orchestration tools are:
Out of these, Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestration tool. Most of the cloud providers like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure provide a managed Kubernetes service wherein we do not have to manage the Kubernetes cluster. It is taken care of by the service provider. We can use their cluster for our deployments.
Some of the examples of managed Kubernetes cluster are:
Conclusion
The container orchestration automates the lifecycle management of containers at scale. It has drastically improved the frequency, agility, and efficiency with which an application is deployed. With improved resource management and load balancing, container orchestration can be really extremely valuable step to managing the containers at scale and thereby improving the productivity and scalability of the organization.
Originally published at https://techctl.com on May 4, 2021.
