What Is Container Orchestration? Which are the best Tools?

Containerization is the increasingly used technology that allows the collaboration between different teams (development, security, quality control). All news concerning containers become immediately popular, especially talking about orchestration. What is it, why is it so famous, and which are the best tools for companies?

What is a Container?

Listen to our expert Giulio, who answers this question in one minute:

What is the Container Orchestration?

The application deployment used to be very difficult in the past, because it was carried out manually. Some tools like Ansible and Puppet made the process easier, managing lots of procedures automatically and reducing time because there was no more necessity to continuously supervise the workflow, or to setup every single step.

The container orchestration solutions were created with a similar purpose: improve the teams work getting processes automatic.

How the container orchestration simplifies workloads

1. Users don’t have to deal with mechanical tasks anymore
2. It interacts with more containers’ groups at the same time
3. It plans and implements a container register
4. It provides network, storage, security and telemetry services

The best Container Orchestration Software

Today we want to talk about Kubernetes, chosen by lots of companies that are using containers and particularly appreciated for its orchestration function.

Kubernetes is a Google open source project known for its medium/large clusters and complex applications management. Some of the main reasons why lots of companies are already using this tool are its versatility and the possibility to manage deployments on large-scale.

Its contribution in manual processes elimination, both for deployment and containerized applications, allows it to manage, help and simplify the Linux containers host clusters in a more scalable way to better manage the workloads.

Kubernetes' advantages for companies

1. Container orchestration between more hosts
2. Common problems caused by the containers proliferation resolution thanks to the organization in “pod”
3. Resources optimization thanks to a more efficient hardware use
4. Deployment check and automation
5. Application and resources real-time scalability
6. Applications are automatically controlled and corrected
7. Non-invasive introduction of tests and new functionalities, through blue-green deployment techniques.

Integrations

The Kubernetes container orchestration can be integrated with everything useful to improve the workloads: Cloud, Networking, Storage, Security, Telemetry and so on.

An example.

The biggest companies, using containers for the software development, integrate this solution with their own technology: the last Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform version provides a complete container application platform based on Kubernetes, while Docker has recently announced that the application development orchestration functionality can be implemented using both Docker Swarm or Kubernetes.

Microsoft Azure Container Service is going to release an update with Kubernetes at the heart. Azure Container Service (also called “AKS”) helps the Azure users to manage containers using different technologies like Docker, Mesosphere and Kubernetes, but now is going to make Kubernetes the default technology to resize and distribute containers.

We can affirm that now Docker and Mesosphere incorporate the Kubernetes support inside their portfolio and this technology is increasingly becoming the standard for container orchestration.

If you want to learn more about the best DevOps tools for your company to face the digital transformation process, you can download our free guide: