Learn the Basics and Benefits of Container Orchestration

Containers decouple your applications from their development environments, allowing them to be built, tested, deployed, and redeployed consistently across platforms. While containers have simplified application development, organizations may eventually find them harder to manage and maintain, particularly when their number grows into the thousands. Container orchestration helps ease the deployment and management of your containers and allows them to run much more smoothly.

What Is Container Orchestration?

Containers are where an application’s executables, dependencies such as libraries and other binaries, and configuration files are packaged before deployment. Once packaged in a container, an application can be deployed anywhere without any changes. Before, development teams worried about the platform on which the application will be deployed, but now containerization does away with that issue.

Containerization has been likened to virtualization, as both deal with virtualized components. However, while virtualization operates on the hardware level, containerization virtualizes on the OS level. This does not mean that containers run on OS images, like virtual machines (VMs). Instead, containerized applications and their dependencies reside on a host machine with a single operating system, but they are isolated from one another and anything else within the host. Since containers work with the same resources available to the OS and its kernel, they do not require a hypervisor the way virtual machines do.

Since applications are abstracted from the OS of the machine on which development takes place, incompatibility with another platform is unheard of under containerization. This is true, regardless of the application’s operating system (e.g., Linux, macOS, and Windows) or deployment platform (e.g., private cloud and public cloud).

How Does Container Orchestration Work?

Container orchestration software acts as a layer between containers and their resource pools. Container orchestration software relies on configuration files to control the containers in your environment. Written in either YAML or JSON, configuration files tell container orchestration software the location of your container images and the logs of those containers. These configuration files also describe rules for mounting containers in storage volumes and how to establish network connections between your containers.

In addition, container orchestration software schedules the deployment of containers, or replicated groups of them, to hosts or host clusters based on factors such as availability of CPU and memory. Labels, metadata, and location vis-a-vis other hosts are among the other constraints considered during container deployment.

Once a container is deployed to a host, the container orchestration software takes care of managing it based on the definitions file that IT administrators create for the container.

Container orchestration automates the following container-related tasks:

Configuring applications running in containers
Monitoring the health of containers and hosts
Provisioning, deployment, redundancy, and availability of the container
Scaling containers up or down depending on workload requirements
Moving one container to another host if the resources on the current host are no longer capable of handling the container
Allocating resources between containers and making sure that workloads are spread across containers
Discovering and exposing services running in containers to other applications

Attracted by their versatility, more organizations have started using container orchestration software on either on-premises servers or the public cloud. Contributing to the growth of container orchestration is the widespread support from leading cloud vendors such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.

How is Container Orchestration Adopted in an Organization?

Though it has the same advantages as virtual machines, containers are more powerful, more lightweight, more efficient, and simpler. From a container, an application may access resources on the host machine, regardless of whether the machine is a physical or virtual one.

The more complex the application, the more it lends itself to the use of containers. Large applications may comprise several or even hundreds to thousands of containers. Applications with many microservices are ideal for deployment in containers.

However, not all applications are suitable for deployment as containers. If you have simple applications, you might be better off deploying them without using containers. However, if you want to deliver more scalable and agile applications, containers might be ideal for you. Another area where containers may not be ideal are industries subject to regulatory requirements—although containers are isolated, VMs provide even more isolation.

Once an organization discovers the advantages that containers offer, it gravitates towards widely implementing the technology. While development teams reap the benefits, IT staff may find themselves overworked as a result. Complexity may result once the number of containers deployed across an organization grows. This is where container orchestration comes in.

With container orchestration, large numbers of containerized applications become more manageable. Using container orchestration, development teams are better able to manage the work they perform on containers. IT teams, on the other hand, can provision and deploy containers automatically, make them widely available and redundant, and scale the number of containers up or scale down to better handle workloads. In summary, the benefits of containers are realized more easily with container orchestration.

What Are the Benefits of Container Orchestration?

Containerization and container orchestration bring many benefits to your organization, including the following:

Improved applications development: With containers, applications development, testing, and production are accelerated. New versions with new features can be set up quickly in production and rolled back when there is a need for it. Thus, containers are ideal for use in Agile environments. They also make for more efficient DevOps since containerized applications will run practically anywhere.
Simplified installation and deployment: Since everything related to the application resides within containers, application installation is easier. When there is a need to scale up due to increased demand or traffic, container orchestration allows for the easy setup of new instances.
Lower resource requirements: Since containers do not include OS images, they are more lightweight than traditional applications. If you are currently operating in a virtualized environment, they are also much easier to operate and maintain than VMs. Container orchestration tools help with resource management.
Lower costs: Several containers can be accommodated per host, even in environments that do not use any form of container orchestration. The number of containers residing per host is higher in companies using container orchestration software.
Better productivity: Containers already allow rapid testing, deployment, patching, and scaling up. Container orchestration tools make these processes even faster.
Improved security: With applications and their processes isolated in containers, application security is enhanced. Container orchestration tools also ensure that only specific resources are shared between users.
Ideal for microservices architecture: Traditional applications are mostly monolithic in nature—they have tightly coupled components acting together to perform the tasks they were designed to do. Microservices are characterized by loose coupling among application components, with each service able to be scaled or modified separately. Containers are built for microservices. Container orchestration allows containerized services to act more fluidly in conjunction with other services.

A Multi-Cloud Container Orchestration

The phrase “multi-cloud” refers to an IT strategy that involves the use of two or more distinct cloud services through two or more suppliers. Multi-cloud, in the setting of containers and orchestration, generally refers to the usage of two or more cloud infrastructure systems for executing applications, including public and private clouds. Instead of operating containers in a single cloud environment, multi-cloud container orchestration refers to the usage of orchestration software to operate containers across several cloud infrastructure environments.

Multi-cloud techniques are pursued by software teams for a variety of reasons, but the advantages might include infrastructure cost reduction, flexibility, and mobility (including decreasing vendor lock-in), and scaling (such as dynamically scaling out a cloud from an on-premises environment when necessary.)

Who Are the Market Leaders in Container Orchestration?

The predictability that containers bring has revolutionized software development. Containers have seen widespread use since Docker, the first well-known container platform, came out in 2013. Docker remains the top container platform. It is essentially a runtime environment that allows software creation in containers.

Kubernetes vs Docker

Of the current crop of container orchestration tools, the most popular is the open-source platform Kubernetes, or K8s, as it is sometimes stylized based on the number of letters between “K” and “s.” Kubernetes was originally developed by Google but is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

The popularity of Kubernetes is such that it is sometimes mistaken as a competitor to Docker. This is not the case, however, since Kubernetes does container orchestration. Docker is just one of the container platforms that is supported on Kubernetes.

Docker has its own integrated container orchestration platform, Docker Swarm, which is designed for simpler and smaller container applications without a need for scale. For more complex applications, Docker recommends Kubernetes.

Kubernetes offers full container support and is built to provide comprehensive container orchestration. For this reason, it is relatively complex compared to Docker Swarm.

Major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Bluemix, and Red Hat OpenShift offer support for Kubernetes. In fact, most cloud providers now have so-called Kubernetes-as-a-Service products. For example, Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes, Azure Kubernetes Services, and Google Kubernetes Engine.

Apache Mesos

Apache Mesos is yet another container orchestration market leader that takes somewhat of a more modular and distributed approach to container management. It gives users the flexibility to scale the applications that they can run. It also allows users to run other container management frameworks like Chronos, Mesosphere Marathon, Apache Aurora, etc. It abstracts data center resources to a single pool, automates day-to-day operations by collocating diverse workloads, and manages stateless micro-services and Java.

Publish Your Internal Applications with Parallels RAS

Parallels® RAS (Remote Application Server) is the perfect platform for publishing internal applications built on containers. Using Parallels RAS, applications can be kept in containers but distributed to the users using Parallels RAS application publishing technology.

Parallels RAS allows on-premises deployments for rollout on either physical servers or VMs. This makes it ideal for organizations that require end-to-end control of data, provisioning, backup, and failover. This setup can be performed in an organization’s own datacenters or by third-party providers. Parallels RAS also supports public cloud deployments in Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

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