Why and What of Container Orchestration answered

Why container orchestration

So … you’ve decided to containerize your application which has static content, a java based API and a backend database. You’ve created a container image for static content based on apache, then another one for API using tomcat and for database a MySQL container image. You required more than one instance of the apache container to provide the required concurrently and fault tolerance. Same with the API. In this situation you could end up with a minimum of 5 containers and you are required to manage them. There may be requirement to add more apache or tomcat containers to service the customers at required satisfaction level, which means more administration overhead and image a container or host that is hosting the container failing … what would you do? How would you recover form that situation?  One of the thoughts you get is automation! An automation which can provide fault tolerance, provides scaling options etc… Effecting you are looking for something/automation that can orchestrate your containers life cycle, fault-tolerance, scaling, deployment and accessibility.

What is container Orchestration

The container orchestrators should provide the following features

• Bring multiple hosts together and make them part of a cluster
• Schedule containers to run on different hosts
• Help containers running on one host reach out to containers running on other hosts in the cluster
• Bind containers and storage
• Bind containers of similar type to a higher-level construct, like services, so we don’t have to deal with individual containers
• Keep resource usage in-check, and optimize it when necessary
• Allow secure access to applications running inside containers.

Some of the well-known container orchestration tools are:

• Docker Swarm: Docker Swarm is a container orchestrator provided by Docker, Inc. It is part of Docker Engine.
• Kubernetes: Kubernetes was started by Google, but now, it is a part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation project.
• Mesos Marathon: Marathon is one of the frameworks to run containers at scale on Apache Mesos.

Here, on my blog … we are going to discuss Kubernetes

“Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.”

Do you know! Kubernetes word comes from the Greek word κυβερνήτης:, which means helmsman or ship pilot.