Container orchestration automates the deployment, management, scaling, and networking of containers. Enterprises that need to deploy and manage hundreds or thousands of Linux® containers and hosts can benefit from container orchestration.
Container orchestration can be used in any environment where you use containers. It can help you to deploy the same application across different environments without needing to redesign it. And microservices in containers make it easier to orchestrate services, including storage, networking, and security.
Containers give your microservice-based apps an ideal application deployment unit and self-contained execution environment. They make it possible to run multiple parts of an app independently in microservices, on the same hardware, with much greater control over individual pieces and life cycles.
Managing the lifecycle of containers with orchestration also supports DevOps teams who integrate it into CI/CD workflows. Along with application programming interfaces (APIs) and DevOps teams, containerized microservices are the foundation for cloud-native applications.
Container orchestration used for:
- Provisioning and deployment
- Configuration and scheduling
- Resource allocation
- Container availability
- Scaling or removing containers based on balancing workloads across your infrastructure
- Load balancing and traffic routing
- Monitoring container health
- Configuring applications based on the container in which they will run
When comparing Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes, it becomes apparent that the origins of both platforms have played key roles in shaping their features and communities today.
Docker, realizing the strength of its container technology, decided to build a platform that made it simple for Docker users to begin orchestrating their container workloads across multiple nodes. However, their desire to preserve this tight coupling can be said to have limited the extensibility of the platform.
Kubernetes, on the other hand, took key concepts taken from Google Borg, and, from a high level perspective, decided to make containerization fit into the former platform’s existing workload orchestration model. This resulted in Kubernetes emphasis on reliability, sometimes at the cost of simplicity and performance.