Prior to the late 2000s, there were no automated tools for deploying containers. What is container orchestration and why is it important? How does it work? I will answer all of those questions and more in this guide.
In this blog I will walk you through what is Container Orchestration, What can you achieve with container orchestration systems, What are its benefits and which are the tools which you can use for orchestrating containers.
What is Container Orchestration?
Container orchestration is a framework for managing and running containerized applications. It helps with the deployment, scaling, and management of containers.
A container orchestration tool automatically configures a database, load balancer, and web server for a project. This software facilitates the movement of containers over a cluster of nodes. A cluster of nodes typically consist of one or more physical machines or virtual machines.
What can you achieve with Container Orchestration?
They do essentially these three things:
1. They automatically build images from source code
2. They run containers based on those images on cloud infrastructure
3. They keep those images running reliably by updating them with new features, bug fixes, etc.
How can you achieve Container Orchestration?
We can Orchestrate Containers in two ways;
1) The first is the manual way where we use prebuilt and configured images and manually set up all the dependencies in each container. This requires a lot of time and effort on our part to build all these images, configure them with appropriate credentials etc. And this process does not provide us with any additional benefits. Manual deployments are more hands-on because a person is needed to individually configure the database, load balancer, and web server for a project.
2) The second approach is automated, where we use some form of an open source tool like Docker or Kubernetes to automate the task of creating, deploying, and scaling our containers across various compute nodes. These tools can help us greatly. Automated deployments typically use some form of open-source tool like Docker or Kubernetes (or any other) to create an environment in which to deploy the application.
Categories of Container Orchestration
There are three main categories for container orchestration tools:
- Centralized management: A central authority manages it which controls all the actions on the node-level. Examples include Docker Swarm, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure App Service, Amazon Elastic Container Service, Apache Mesos.
- Centralized control with distributed execution: A central authority manages it too but have distributed execution mechanisms that allow for different executions paths on the node level. Examples include Kubernetes and Nomad Distributed management with centralized control.
- Centralized control with distributed data: A central authority manages the data but has distributed execution mechanisms that allow for different executions paths on the node level. Examples include Hadoop and Spark
Best Container Orchestration Tools:
Some of the popular orchestration tools are listed as below –
- Docker Swarm – Docker Swarm is open source container orchestration software which means that it can be downloaded for free. It offers a container management platform for Docker containers.
- Google Container Engine – Google offers Container Engine, which is a managed environment for running applications on large-scale clusters of virtual machines.
- Amazon Elastic Container Service – Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a solution with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to deploy containers across multiple servers in order to optimize utilization of computer resources.
- Apache Mesos – Apache Mesos is an open-source cluster computing framework designed to distribute the workload of large applications across multiple machines, simplifying the process of updating and scaling individual nodes in a cluster.
- Kubernetes – Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestration engine used by IT professionals today. It is an open source, container management solution developed by Google.Kubernetes is written in Go and runs on both Linux and Microsoft Windows systems.
Conclusion
Depending on your needs, you may need to use any one of these container orchestration tools when deploying your application. The right combination for you will depend on the requirements of your company, but it is best to start with Kubernetes.
I hope this post helps you in understanding more about container orchestrations. Please leave your comments below and let me know your thoughts. For more articles visit DevOps Pod.
You need to be a part of a contest for one of the best blogs on the net. I will highly recommend this blog!