What is container orchestration and Kubernetes

Saiyam Pathak avatar
By Saiyam Pathak
Director of Technical Evangelism

Description

Learn about container orchestration, the purpose of, how and Kubernetes fits into this.


Transcription

Introduction to container orchestration

We know that we can pack this application as the images with all its libraries and dependencies and run them as containers. So running a few containers is fine, but when you see a production-ready scenario where you want to run thousands of containers, you need container orchestration because you cannot create, manage, and do many things manually.

Container orchestration and its characteristics

Container orchestration system is a concept that has some of its features with a container orchestrator by which it should be able to create and manage thousands of containers. It should be able to monitor those containers and their state, and it should scale based on the workloads. It should also handle all the container networking, and it should be able to self-heal the containers if one goes down or it goes out of memory, or anything happens to the containers. These are some of the characteristics of container orchestration because these are the essential characteristics.

Kubernetes as a container orchestrator

Now let's dive into Kubernetes. So Kubernetes, aka k8s, the 8 is just a number of alphabets between K and S. It is a container orchestrator. By definition, Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. So Kubernetes was born at Google, and it shares the same DNA as BORG and OMEGA. So BORG and OMEGA were other systems and solutions developed at Google in the past decades. From that experience and community support, Kubernetes has become one of the de facto standards for running containers in a production-ready environment. It's a CNCF Graduated Project.

Kubernetes features

One of the very cool features of Kubernetes is its extensibility. So you can extend Kubernetes in many ways. You can develop different components. Yes, everything is open-sourced, but the extensibility is easy, and people extend and create many things on top of Kubernetes. For example, you can have your scheduler running with the base cellular. You can have your own Kubernetes object by running the operator state, the CRDs. So all those things are very powerful and give you a lot of power.

There is the community. It has more than 100,000 members of the Kubernetes lab, so you have excellent community support, which drives this vast project and takes it towards excellent stability for running containers in production.

Conclusion

That was just a brief about what a container orchestrator is, and Kubernetes is one of the de facto ones. Thank you for watching.

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