Introduction

Container orchestration automates the deployment, management, scaling and networking of containers across the cluster. It is focused on managing the lifecycle of containers.

Enterprises that need to deploy and manage hundreds or thousands of Linux containers and hosts can benefit from container orchestration.

Let’s say a major online shopping platform announced a holiday sale with a bunch of offers on all products. During the sale, the online portal experiences a huge rise in the user traffic to their web applications, which can slow down the UI including high chances of the site itself getting down. We need to increase the number of instances/scale up the number of containers during the peak time to handle the load. We cannot forecast the load nor want to increase the instance manually. We need some agent/program that can automatically do that for us and once the festive offer is finished, the total number of containers of the application should be reduced as there won’t be any load.

To enable this functionality, we need an underlying platform with a set of resources and capabilities that can automatically scale up or down based on the load.

This whole process of deploying and managing containers is known as container orchestration.

KUBERNETES

Kubernetes is an open-source, container orchestration tool.In a production environment, you need to manage the containers that run the applications and ensure that there is no downtime. For example, if a container goes down, another container needs to start. Wouldn’t it be easier if this behavior was handled by a system?

That’s how Kubernetes comes to the rescue! Kubernetes provides you with a framework to run distributed systems resiliently. It takes care of scaling and failover for your application, provides deployment patterns, and more.