What is container orchestration?

• Container orchestration is the process of automating the deployment, management, scaling, and networking of containers throughout their lifecycle.
• Container orchestration platforms, such as Kubernetes, create a smooth, self-managing operation.
• Orchestration coordinates microservices in separate containers.
• Kubernetes eliminates many of the manual processes involved in deploying and scaling containerized applications.
• Red Hat creates essential tools for securing, simplifying, and automatically updating your container infrastructure.

What is container orchestration?

Container orchestration is the process of automating the deployment, management, scaling, and networking of containers throughout their lifecycle, making it possible to deploy software consistently across many different environments at scale.

Containers, which package an application and its runtime environment together in a self-contained unit, are foundational to cloud native application development. Container orchestration is especially important for enterprises that need to deploy and manage hundreds or thousands of containers and hosts. Most container orchestration solutions are built on Kubernetes, a widely adopted open source platform. 

Ebook: Use Red Hat OpenShift as a modern application platform

Container orchestration platforms, such as Kubernetes, automate the entire lifecycle of containers, transforming what would be a non-stop maintenance operation for IT teams into a smooth, self-managing operation.

Container orchestration brings advantages in development methods, costs, and security.

Faster development

Containers, which are designed to be portable and run consistently across environments, unlock opportunities for faster methods of software development. Container orchestration makes it possible to build continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, which improve software delivery throughout the software development lifecycle via automation. Container orchestration also connects to a DevOps approach, which aims to accelerate the processes of bringing an idea from development to deployment.

Cost savings

Container orchestration can automatically scale containers based on your needs, providing the needed capacity for your applications, while conserving resources and reducing costs. A container orchestration platform can provide the necessary flexibility for an organization to make efficient use of multicloud and hybrid environments.

Security

Developing software in containers helps teams fix security issues at the build stage, rather than having to update or patch a running application. This allows for better predictability in container behavior and anomalous behavior detection. With container orchestration, an organization can also apply policies for security and governance, and segment policies by pods or groups of pods. Container orchestration platforms also support role-based access control (RBAC), which assigns specific permissions to users and service accounts.

Container orchestration manages the intense operational demands of modern, cloud-native applications. In the past, a software application was a single, massive block or “monolith.” Today, applications are broken down into dozens or hundreds of tiny, independent services called microservices, each running in its own container. Orchestration coordinates these moving parts, ensuring they can communicate, scale independently, and run reliably across different environments.

Use container orchestration to automate and manage tasks such as:

• Provisioning and deployment: The orchestrator reads your configuration blueprint, downloads the required container images, and automatically initializes them across your infrastructure.
• Configuration and scheduling: It evaluates your cluster's servers to choose the optimal host for each container and inject the necessary environment variables and storage settings at startup.
• Resource allocation: Using defined CPU and memory limits, the orchestrator intelligently packs containers onto servers, maximizing hardware efficiency without letting applications starve each other of resources.
• Container availability: It continuously monitors the cluster and instantly replaces any crashed containers or failed servers.
• Scaling and workload balancing: It automatically spins up additional container replicas when traffic spikes hit defined resource thresholds and removes them when demand subsides to cut costs.
• Load balancing and traffic routing: It provides a permanent internal routing endpoint that evenly distributes network traffic across a shifting pool of container IP addresses.
• Monitoring container health: Automated probes regularly check if containers are running properly, instantly restarting frozen applications and holding traffic from those that are still booting up.
• Configuring applications per container: It decouples settings from the application code by injecting unique configurations and secret keys directly into the container environment at runtime.
• Keeping interactions secure: It applies strict, isolated network firewall policies that explicitly dictate which containers are allowed to communicate with each other, minimizing security risks.

Container orchestration tools provide a framework for managing containers and microservices architecture at scale. There are many container orchestration tools that can be used for container lifecycle management. Some popular options are Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and Apache Mesos.

Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration tool that was originally developed and designed by engineers at Google. Google donated the Kubernetes project to the newly formed Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2015.

How Kubernetes helps with container orchestration

Kubernetes orchestration allows you to build application services that span multiple containers, schedule containers across a cluster, scale those containers, and manage their health over time.

Kubernetes eliminates many of the manual processes involved in deploying and scaling containerized applications. You can cluster together groups of hosts, either physical or virtual machines, running Linux containers, and Kubernetes gives you the platform to easily and efficiently manage those clusters. 

More broadly, it helps you fully implement and rely on a container-based infrastructure in production environments. These clusters can span hosts across public, private, or hybrid clouds. For this reason, Kubernetes is an ideal platform for hosting cloud-native apps that require rapid scaling.

Kubernetes also assists with workload portability and load balancing by letting you move applications without redesigning them. 

Main components of Kubernetes:

• Cluster: A control plane and one or more compute machines, or nodes.
• Control plane: The collection of processes that control Kubernetes nodes. This is where all task assignments originate.
• Kubelet: This service runs on nodes and reads the container manifests and ensures the defined containers are started and running.
• Pod: A group of one or more containers deployed to a single node. All containers in a pod share an IP address, IPC, hostname, and other resources.

Container orchestration tools work by running a continuous reconciliation loop (also called a control loop) that constantly matches reality to your instructions.

Instead of giving the tool step-by-step commands (an imperative method), you give it a blueprint of what you want the end result to look like (a declarative method). The orchestrator's sole job is to make sure the actual state of your infrastructure always perfectly matches your desired blueprint.

When you use a container orchestration tool, such as Kubernetes, you will describe the configuration of an application using either a YAML or JSON file. The configuration file tells the configuration management tool where to find the container images, how to establish a network, and where to store logs.

When deploying a new container, the container management tool automatically schedules the deployment to a cluster and finds the right host, taking into account any defined requirements or restrictions. The orchestration tool then manages the container’s lifecycle based on the specifications that were determined in the compose file.

You can use Kubernetes patterns to manage the configuration, lifecycle, and scale of container-based applications and services. These repeatable patterns are the tools needed by a Kubernetes developer to build complete systems. 

Container orchestration can be used in any environment that runs containers, including on-premise servers and public cloud or private cloud environments.

Red Hat is a leader and active builder of open source container technology and creates essential tools for securing, simplifying, and automatically updating your container infrastructure.

With Red Hat® OpenShift®, your developers can make new containerized apps, host them, and deploy them in the cloud with the scalability, control, and orchestration that can turn a good idea into new business quickly and easily. If you’re looking to deploy or move your Kubernetes workloads to a managed cloud service, OpenShift is also available as a cloud-native service on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and other providers.

Building on a foundation of OpenShift, you can use Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management and Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform together to help you efficiently deploy and manage multiple Kubernetes clusters across regions, including public cloud, on-premise, and edge environments.