Running containers locally or on a single server is straightforward, but operational challenges arise with widespread container usage.
The high efficiency of containers results in smaller applications and services, leading to an abundance of loosely coupled, isolated, and independent containers.
Microservice Architectures:
Small, self-contained containers form the basis of microservice architectures.
These containers encapsulate discrete units of business logic within a larger application.
Managing Large Container Deployments:
Deploying and managing numerous containers requires a system for efficient management.
Challenges include providing compute resources, scheduling, resource allocation, availability management, failover, scaling, networking, and storage provisioning.
Container Orchestration Systems:
Container orchestration systems address the need for managing large container deployments.
Comprising a control plane for container management and worker nodes for container hosting.
Key Orchestration System Responsibilities:
Provide compute resources (virtual machines) for container execution.
Schedule containers efficiently across servers.
Allocate CPU and memory resources to containers.
Manage container availability and replace failed instances.
Scale containers in response to increased load.
Establish networking to connect containers.
Provision storage for containers requiring persistent data.
Industry Standard:
Kubernetes has emerged as the industry-standard container orchestration system.
Chosen for its effectiveness in addressing the complexities of container management.
Other systems, once relevant, have faded in significance over the years.