What Is Container Orchestration?

Container orchestration is a process that automates the deployment, management, scaling, networking, and availability of container-based applications

If your application relies on other containers such as databases or messaging services or other backend services? What if the number of users increases and you need to scale your application? How do you scale down when the load decreases? To enable these functionalities, you need an underlying platform with a set of resources and capabilities. The platform needs to orchestrate the connectivity between the containers and automatically scale up or down based on the load. This whole process of automatically deploying and managing containers is known as Container Orchestration. Kubernetes is just a container orchestration technology. There are multiple such technologies available today. Docker has its own tool called Docker Swarm , Kubernetes from Google and MESOS from Apache.

While Docker Swarm is really easy to set up and get started, it lacks some of the advanced features required for complex applications.

MESOS, on the other hand, is quite difficult to set up and get started but supports many advanced features.

Kubernetes arguably the most popular of it all, is a bit difficult to set up and get started by provides a lot of options to customize deployments and supports the deployment of complex architectures. Kubernetes is now supported on all public cloud service providers like GCP, Azure, AWS, and Kubernetes project is one of the top-ranked projects in Github.

There are various advantages of Container Orchestration: Your application is now highly available as hardware failures to not bring your application down because we have multiple instances of your application running on different nodes.

The user traffic is load balanced across the various containers. When demand increases, deploy more instances of the applications seamlessly and within a matter of seconds. And we have the ability to do that at a service level when we run out of hardware resources, scale the number of underlying nodes up or down without having to take down the application and do all of these easily with a set of declarative object configuration files. And that is Kubernetes. It is a container orchestration technology used to orchestrate the deployment and management of hundreds and thousands of containers in a clustered environment.