Container orchestration fundamentals

As soon as we started using containers it became obvious we needed help managing them. This is because we were breaking large applications into lots of small loosely coupled microservices that were scaling up and down and we were rolling out new versions and updates all the time. As an example, a single large monolithic application that rarely changed would be replaced with a sprawling microservices application that changes all the time. Help was needed.

Tools like Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesosphere DCOS were created to help solve the problem. To cut a long story short, Kubernetes emerged as the most popular of those tools and is now the most important cloud native technology on the planet.

At a high level, Kubernetes is a container orchestrator. This means it runs and manages applications that run in containers. Part of this includes providing cloud native features such as scheduling, self-healing, and autoscaling.

Let’s consider...