What is container orchestration?

Container orchestration is the automation of much of the operational effort required to run containerized workloads and services. This includes a wide range of things software teams need to manage a container’s lifecycle, including provisioning, deployment, scaling (up and down), networking, load balancing and more.

Because containers are lightweight and ephemeral by nature, running them in production can quickly become a massive effort. Particularly when paired with microservices—which typically each run in their own containers—a containerized application might translate into operating hundreds or thousands of containers, especially when building and operating any large-scale system.

This can introduce significant complexity if managed manually. Container orchestration is what makes that operational complexity manageable for development and operations—or DevOps—because it provides a declarative way of automating much of the work. This makes it a good fit for DevOps teams and culture, which typically strive to operate with much greater speed and agility than traditional software teams.

Container orchestration is key to working with containers, and it allows organizations to unlock their full benefits. It also offers its own benefits for a containerized environment, including: 

• Simplified operations: This is the most important benefit of container orchestration and the main reason for its adoption. Containers introduce a large amount of complexity that can quickly get out of control without container orchestration to manage it.
• Resilience: Container orchestration tools can automatically restart or scale a container or cluster, boosting resilience.
• Added security: Container orchestration’s automated approach helps keep containerized applications secure by reducing or eliminating the chance of human error. 

Containers are a method of building, packaging and deploying software. They are similar to but not the same thing as virtual machines (VMs). One of the primary differences is that containers are isolated or abstracted away from the underlying operating system and infrastructure that they run on. In the simplest terms, a container includes both an application’s code and everything that code needs to run properly.

Because of this, containers offer many benefits, including:

• Portability: One of the biggest benefits of containers is that they’re built to run in any environment. This makes containerized workloads easier to move between different cloud platforms, for example, without having to rewrite large amounts of code to ensure it will execute properly, regardless of the underlying operating system or other factors. This also boosts developer productivity, since they can write code in a consistent manner without worrying about its execution when deployed to different environments—from a local machine to an on-premises server to a public cloud.
• Application development: Containers can speed up application development and deployments, including changes or updates over time. This is particularly true with containerized microservices. This is an approach to software architecture that entails breaking up a larger solution into smaller parts. Those discrete components (or microservices) can then be deployed, updated or retired independently, without having to update and redeploy the entire application.
• Resource utilization and optimization: Containers are lightweight and ephemeral, so they consume fewer resources. You can run many containers on a single machine, for example.