Nowadays we can't imagine building and maintaining popular services and applications without stable, well-coordinated complex configurations. To operate computer systems fast and manage resources efficiently, you will need advanced technologies, like orchestration.
What is orchestration?
Orchestration is the automated configuration, management, and coordination of computer systems, applications, and services. Orchestration helps companies easily manage complex tasks and workflows. Moreover, it helps manage networking and storage parameters.
There are many challenges in a wide range of fields, like cloud services, server configuration, and containerized application development. To tackle them, you will need a tool that can manage processes and make sure that all tasks are completed in the correct order. Orchestration has different implementations for cloud, server, and container orchestration.
For now, let's explore container orchestration in detail.
Container orchestration
Container orchestration automates the deployment, management, scaling, and networking of containers. Container orchestration can be useful for companies that regularly launch and control a significant number of hosts and containers.
Most container orchestration tools let you automate a ton of different processes:
- Provisioning and deployment
- Configuration and scheduling
- Load balancing and traffic routing
- Monitoring container health
On top of automation, container orchestration gives you the ability:
- to deploy the same containerized application across many environments without modifying the application;
- to manage storage, networking, and security services in a simpler way.
Many container orchestration platforms support a declarative configuration model. A developer writes a config file (in YAML or JSON) to describe the configuration, and the tool does its best to achieve the expected state. When you provide a config file, the tool schedules container deployment. After deployment, the platform will manage the workload and the lifecycle of containers.
The benefits of using orchestration tools are clear. The ability to simplify complexity has made orchestration tools so popular.
Popular solutions
Two of the most widely used container orchestration tools on the market are Docker Compose and Kubernetes.
Docker Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications. It runs containers on a single host machine. This instrument is widely used to create and destroy isolated testing environments. Docker Compose can configure all the application's service dependencies before starting the service. This makes it a capable instrument for local development. For more information about Docker Compose, visit Docker's official documentation.
Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Kubernetes is a better option for large production-grade deployments because of its ability to manage and deploy large numbers of containers on multiple hosts, with better reliability and fault tolerance. Kubernetes is more complex to set up in the beginning but offers greater flexibility and boasts more features. Visit Kubernetes' official website to learn more.
While Docker Compose is about creating and starting one or multiple containers, Kubernetes serves as a platform to create a network where you can orchestrate containers.
Conclusion
To sum up what you learned in this topic:
- Orchestration is the automated configuration, management, and coordination of computer systems, applications, and services.
- Among the variety of fields, we focused on container orchestration. This type of tool gives you the ability to simplify containerized application deployment and resource management.
- Container orchestration tools help automate tasks, like provisioning, scheduling, load balancing, and health monitoring of the containers.
- To describe the container orchestration configuration, you need to write a config file with declarative instructions.
- You examined two popular container orchestration solutions: Docker Compose and Kubernetes.
- Docker Compose runs isolated testing environments on a single host and fits more for development purposes.
- Kubernetes can manage multiple hosts and is a better option for production-grained solutions.