What is container orchestration?

In Chapter 6, you were introduced to Docker. You learned that Docker is a way of building and packaging software, allowing for easier distribution and execution. You also learned in the chapter about Jakarta EE and that it has introduced a specialized profile, the Core Profile, targeted at microservices and containerization. You are likely to have many containers running, and this is where container orchestration comes into play.

Container orchestration is the process of creating, scheduling, scaling, and monitoring containers. The number of containers that are required to run an application can quickly grow, even a standard architecture with a frontend, backend, and database – that is already three containers. And then you have additional requirements, such as a caching instance, a reversed proxy, and a CDN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network) server.

Also, you might want to have more than one instance of each, in case...